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THE 

PERSON OF CHRIST 

HIS PERFECT HUMANITY 
A PROOF OF HIS DIVINITY 

WITH IMPARTIAL TESTIMONIES 
TO HIS CHARACTER 

By PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D., LL.D. 



With FOREWORD By 
REV. CORTLAND MYERS, D.D. 



REVISED EDITION 
FROM NEW PLATES 



AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
150 NASSAU STREET NEW YORK 






Copyright, 1913, by 
AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 



(S)CI.A3 5431n 



FOREWORD 

The one interrogation pushing its way persistently 
into the hearts and minds of men is — "What think 
ye of Christ?" From this center move out the radii 
through every part of the theological world. It is 
the heart from which the veins and arteries of all 
Christian faith draw their life. This is the question 
of history, the question of the Bible, the question of 
the Church, the question of theology, the question 
of Christianity. A clear, concise and convincing 
answer is given to the world in the pages of this 
volume. 

No man can afford to miss from his library or his 
life the ripened fruit of Dr. SchafF's mind. He has 
entered the Holy of Holies, and brought back to his 
fellow-men a divine message. He has replaced the 
sand of skepticism by the solid rock of Faith. He 
has shown that the central miracle of history is 
Christ Himself, that He is the divine-human Saviour, 
that in this fact Christianity securely rests. 

For the man who desires to know Christ and desires 
to be more like Him, and desires to lead others to 
Him, this book is one of God's choicest gifts. 

Cortland Myers. 
Tbemont Temple, Boston, Mass. 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

With the consent of Professor David S. Schaff, of 
the Western Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pa., 
literary executor of Philip Schaff, the American 
Tract Society has abbreviated the original work as it 
appeared from the hand of Dr. Schaff in 1865 and 
1883. Some testimonies there given have been 
omitted, and critical notes, as far as retained, have 
been transferred for purposes of ready reference 
from the end of the volume to the pages where they 
belong. The tables of contents at the head of the 
chapters are new. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword 3 

Preface 7 

I. Introduction 9 

II. Childhood and Youth 17 

III. Training 24 

IV. Public Life 29 

V. Freedom from Sin 35 

VI. Perfect Holiness 44 

VII. Intercourse with Men 48 

VIII. Unity of Virtue and Piety 53 

IX. Completeness and Universality of Character . 56 

X. Harmony of All Graces and Virtues ... 61 

XI. Passion and Crucifixion 65 

XII. Summary: Christ's Character the Greatest 

Moral Miracle of History 73 

XIII. Christ's Own Testimony Concerning Himself . 79 

XIV. Examination of False Theories 89 

I. The Theory of Imposture 94 

II. The Theory of Enthusiasm or Self-decep- 
tion 96 

III. The Theory of Poetical Fiction . . .102 
XV. Conclusion 120 

APPENDIX : 

Impartial Testimonies 127 



PREFACE 

"What do ye think of the Son of Man? 55 This is 
the religious question of the age. The result of the 
renewed struggle cannot be doubtful: in all theological 
controversies, truth is the gainer in the end. Though 
nailed to the cross and buried in the tomb, it rises again 
triumphant over error, taking captivity captive, and 
changing at times even a bitter foe, like Saul of Tarsus, 
into a devoted friend. Goethe says : "The conflict of faith 
and unbelief remains the proper, the only, the deepest 
theme of the history of the world and mankind, to which 
all others are subordinated. 55 This very conflict centers 
in the Christological problem. 

The question of Christ is the question of Christianity, 
which is the manifestation of his life in the world; it 
is the question of the Church, which rests upon him as 
the immovable rock ; it is the question of history, which 
revolves around him as the sun of the moral universe; 
it is the question of every man who instinctively yearns 
after him as the object of his noblest and purest aspira- 
tions; it is a question of personal salvation, which can 
only be obtained through Jesus. The whole fabric of 
Christianity stands or falls with its divine-human 
Founder ; and if it can never perish, it is because Christ 
lives, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

The object of this book is to show that the Person of 
Christ is the great central miracle of history, and the 
strongest evidence of Christianity. The very perfection 

7 



8 PREFACE 

of his humanity is a proof of his Divinity. The in- 
dwelling of God in him is the only satisfactory explana- 
tion of his amazing character. 

Standing on this rock, we may feel safe against the 
attacks of infidelity. The Person of Christ is to me 
the surest as well as the most sacred of all facts; as 
certain as my own personal existence; yea, even more 
so: for Christ lives in me, and he is the only valuable 
part of my existence. I am nothing without my Sa- 
viour; I am all with him, and would not exchange him 
for the whole world. To give up faith in Christ is to 
give up faith in humanity; to believe in him is to be- 
lieve in the redemption and final glorification of men; 
and this faith is the best inspiration to a holy and useful 
life for the good of our race and the glory of God. 

P.S. 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 



1. THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHRIST. Christ's 

name above every name. Yet thought and argument 
needed. 

2. FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE COMPLEMENTARY. 

Central place of doctrine of Christ. The principle of 
genuine Protestantism. 

3. TWO METHODS OF SHOWING CHRIST'S GODHEAD. 

(1) From the divine to the human. (2) From the 
human to the divine. The second method used here. 
It is in line with present tendencies. 

4. CHRIST'S HUMAN PERSONAL CHARACTER. Per- 

fect in the midst of an imperfect world. Honest in- 
quirers find the truth. 

When the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in 
the burning bush, he was commanded to put off his 
shoes from his feet; for the place whereon he stood was 
holy ground. With what reverence and awe, then, 
should we approach the contemplation of the great 
reality — God manifest in the flesh — of which the vision 
of Moses was but a significant type and shadow! 

1. The Life and Character of Jesus Christ is the 
holy of holies in the history of the world. Eighteen cen- 
turies have passed away since he appeared, in the fulness 
of time, on this earth to redeem a fallen race from sin 
and death, and to open a never-ceasing fountain of 

9 



10 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

righteousness and life. The ages before him anxiously 
awaited his coming, as the fulfillment of the desire of all 
nations ; the ages after him proclaim his glory, and ever 
extend his dominion. The noblest and best of men under 
every clime hold him not only in the purest affection 
and the profoundest gratitude, but in divine adoration 
and worship. His name is above every name that may 
be named in heaven or on earth, and the only one 
whereby sinners can be saved. He is the Author of the 
new creation; the Way, the Truth, and the Life; the 
Prophet, Priest, and King of regenerate humanity. He 
is Immanuel, God with us; the Eternal Word become 
flesh; very God and very man in one undivided person, 
the Saviour of the world. 

Thus he stands out to the faith of the entire Christian 
Church — Greek, Latin, and Evangelical — in every civil- 
ized country on the globe. Much as the various con- 
fessions and denominations differ in doctrines and usages, 
they are agreed in their love and adoration of Jesus. 
They lay down their arms when they approach the 
manger of Bethlehem where he was born, or the cross 
of Calvary where he died for our sins that we might 
live forever in heaven. He is the divine harmony of all 
human sects and creeds, the common life-center of all 
true Christians ; where their hearts meet with their affec- 
tions, prayers, and hopes, in spite of the discord of 
their heads. The doctrines and institutions, the sciences 
and arts of Christendom, bear witness to the indelible 
impression he made upon the world; countless churches 
and cathedrals are as many monuments of gratitude to 
his holy name; hymns and prayers are daily and hourly 
ascending to his praise from public and private sanctu- 
aries in all parts of the globe. His power is now greater, 
his kingdom larger, than ever; and it wiU continue to 



INTRODUCTION 11 

spread, until all nations shall bow before him and kiss 
his scepter of righteousness and peace. 

Blessed is he who from the heart can believe that 
Jesus is the Son of God, and the fountain of salvation. 
True faith is an act of God wrought in the soul by the 
Holy Spirit, who reveals Christ to us in his true char- 
acter, as Christ has revealed the Father. Faith, with 
its justifying, sanctifying, and saving power, is inde- 
pendent of science and learning, and may be kindled 
even in the heart of a little child. It is the peculiar 
glory of the Redeemer and his religion to be coextensive 
with humanity itself, without distinction of sex, age, 
nation, or race. His saving grace flows and overflows 
to all and for all, on the simple condition of faith. 

This fact, however, does not supersede the necessity 
of thought and argument. Revelation, although above 
nature and above reason, is not against nature or 
against reason. On the contrary, nature and the super- 
natural, as has been well said by a distinguished New 
England divine, "constitute together the one system of 
God." 1 Christianity satisfies the deepest intellectual as 
well as moral wants of man, who is created in the image 
and for the glory of God. It is the revelation of truth 
as well as of life. 

2. Faith and Knowledge are not antagonistic, but 
complementary forces ; not enemies, but inseparable twin 
sisters. Faith precedes knowledge, but just as neces- 
sarily it leads to knowledge; while true knowledge, on 
the other hand, is always rooted and grounded in faith, 
and tends to confirm and to strengthen it. Thus we 
find the two combined in the famous confession of Peter, 
when he says, in the name of all the other apostles : "We 

1 Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural 






12 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

believe and we know that thou art the Christ." 2 So 
intimately are both connected, that we may also reverse 
the famous maxim of Augustine, Anselm, and Schleier- 
macher, "Faith precedes knowledge," and say, "Knowl- 
edge precedes faith." For how can we believe in any 
object without at least some general historical knowledge 
of its existence and character? Faith even in its first 
form, as a submission to the authority of God and an 
assent to the truth of his revelation, is an exercise of 
the mind and reason as well as of the heart and the will. 
Hence faith has been defined as implying three things, — 
knowledge, assent, and trust or confidence. An idiot or 
a madman cannot believe. Our religion demands a 
rational, intelligent faith; and this, just in proportion to 
its strength and fervor, aims at an ever-deepening in- 
sight into its own sacred contents and object. 

As living faith in Christ is the soul of all sound 
practical Christianity and piety, so the true doctrine 
of Christ is the soul and center of all sound Christian 
theology. St. John makes the denial of the incarnation 
of the Son of God the criterion of Antichrist, and conse- 
quently the belief in this truth the test of Christianity. 
The incarnation of the eternal Logos, and the divine 
glory shining through the veil of Christ's humanity, is 
the grand theme of his Gospel, which he wrote with the 
pen of an angel from the very heart of Christ, as his 
favorite disciple and bosom friend. The Apostles' Creed, 
starting as it does from the confession of Peter, makes 
the article on Christ most prominent, and assigns to it 
the central position between the preceding article on 
God the Father, and the succeeding article on the Holy 

2 John 6:69 — "We have believed and know." The reverse or- 
der we have in John 10:38: "That ye may know and believe that 
the Father is in me, and I in him;" and in 1 John 5: 13. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

Ghost. The development of ancient Catholic theology 
commenced and culminated with the triumphant defense 
of the true divinity and true humanity of Christ against 
the opposite heresies of Judaizing Ebionism, which denied 
the former, and paganizing Gnosticism, which resolved 
the latter into a shadowy phantom. Evangelical the- 
ology is essentially Christological, or controlled through- 
out by the proper idea of Christ as the God-Man and 
Saviour. This is emphatically the article of the stand- 
ing or falling Church. In this, the two most prominent 
ideas of the Reformation — the doctrine of the supremacy 
of the Scriptures, and the doctrine of justification by 
grace through faith — meet, and are vitally united. 
Christ's word, the only unerring and efficient guide of 
truth; Christ's work, the only unfailing and sufficient 
source of peace; Christ all in all, — this is the principle 
of genuine Protestantism. 

3. Two Methods of Showing Christ's Godhead. — 
In the construction of the true doctrine of Christ's per- 
son, we may, with St. John in the prologue to his Gospel, 
begin from above with his eternal Godhead, and proceed, 
through the creation and the preparatory revelation of 
the Old Testament economy, till we reach the incarnation 
and his truly human life for the redemption of the race. 
Or, with the other Evangelists, we may begin from 
below with his birth from the Virgin Mary, and rise, 
through the successive stages of his earthly life, his dis- 
courses and miracles, to his assumption into that divine 
glory which he had before the foundation of the world. 
The result reached in both cases is the same, namely: 
that Christ unites in his person the whole fulness of the 
Godhead, and the whole fulness of sinless manhood.—— 

The older theologians, both Catholic and Evan- 
gelical, proved the divinity of the Saviour in a direct 



14 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

way from the miracles performed by him; from the 
prophecies and types fulfilled in him; from the divine 
names which he bears ; from the divine attributes which 
are predicated of him ; from the divine works which he 
performed ; and from the divine honors which he claims, 
and which are fully accorded to him by his apostles and 
the whole Christian Church to this day. 

But the divinity of Christ may also be proved by the 
opposite process, — the contemplation of the singular 
perfection of his humanity; which rises by almost uni- 
versal consent, even of unbelievers, so far above every 
human greatness known before or since, that it can only 
be rationally explained on the ground of such an essen- 
tial union with the Godhead as he claimed himself, and 
as his inspired apostles ascribed to him. The more 
deeply we penetrate the veil of his flesh, the more clearly 
we behold the glory of the Only-Begotten of the Father 
shining through the same, full of grace and of truth. 

Modern theology owes this new homage to the Sa- 
viour. The powerful and subtle attacks of the latest 
phases of infidelity upon the credibility of the gospel 
history call for a more vigorous defense than was ever 
made before, and have already led, by way of reaction, 
to new triumphs of the old faith of the Church in her 
divine Head. 

Our humanitarian, philanthropic, and yet skepticaj 
age is more open to this argument, which proceeds from 
the humanity to the divinity, than to the old dogmatic 
method of demonstration which follows the opposite 
process. With Thomas, the representative of honest and 
earnest skepticism among the apostles, many noble and 
inquiring minds refuse to believe in the divinity of the 
Lord unless supported by convincing arguments of rea- 
son : they desire to put the finger into the print of the 



INTRODUCTION 15 

nails, and to thrust the hand into his side, before they 
exclaim, in humble adoration : "My Lord and my God ! " 
They cannot easily be brought to believe in miracles on 
abstract reasoning or on historical evidence. But, if 
they once could see the great moral miracle of Christ's 
person and character, they would have no difficulty with 
his miraculous works. For a superhuman being must 
of necessity do superhuman deeds. The contrary would 
be unnatural, and the greatest miracle. The character 
of the tree accounts for the character of the fruit. We 
believe in the miracles of Christ because we believe in 
his person as the divine Man and the central miracle 
of the moral universe. 

4. Christ's Human Personal Character. — It is from 
this point of view that we shall endeavor to analyze 
and exhibit the human character of Christ. We propose 
to take up the man, Jesus of Nazareth, as he appears 
on the simple, unsophisticated record of the honest fish- 
ermen of Galilee, and as he lives in the faith of Christen- 
dom ; and we shall find him in all the stages of his life, 
both as a private individual and as a public character, 
so far elevated above the reach of successful rivalry, 
and so singularly perfect, that this very perfection, in 
the midst of an imperfect and sinful world, constitutes 
an irresistible proof of his divinity. 

A full discussion of the subject would require us to 
consider Christ in his official as well as personal char- 
acter; and to describe him as a teacher, a reformer, a 
worker of miracles, and the founder of a spiritual king- 
dom universal in extent and perpetual in time. From 
every point of view, we should be irresistibly driven to 
the same result. But our present purpose confines us 
to the consideration of his personal character ; and Lhis 
alone, we think, is sufficient for the conclusion. 



16 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

Infidels, it is true, are seldom converted by argu- 
ment; for the springs of unbelief are in the heart and 
will rather than in the head. But honest and truth- 
loving inquirers, like Nathanael and Thomas, will never 
refuse, on proper evidence, to receive the truth. 

Blessed are they that seek the truth; for they shall 
find it. 



CHAPTER II 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 



5. INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD. Christ comes before us 

as a child. Combination of humility and grandeur. 
Yet no unnatural prodigy. Ennobling influence of 
the Christ-child at Christmas. 

6. BOYHOOD. Scene at twelve in the Temple. Contrast 

of the pseudo-gospels. 

Jesus passed through all the stages of human life 
from infancy to manhood, and represented each in its 
ideal form, that he might redeem and sanctify them all, 
and be a perpetual model for imitation. He was the 
model infant, the model boy, the model youth, and the 
model man. 3 But the weakness, decline, and decrepitude 
of old age would be incompatible with his character and 
mission as the Regenerator of the race and Prince of 
life. He died and rose in the full bloom of early man- 
hood, and lives in the hearts of his people in unfading 
freshness and unbroken vigor forever. 

5. Infancy and Childhood. — Let us first glance at 
the infancy and childhood of Jesus. The history of the 
race commences with the beauty of innocent youth in 
the garden of Eden, "when the morning stars sang to- 
gether, and all the sons of God shouted for joy," in 

a This idea is almost as old as the Christian Church, and was 
already taught by Irenseus, who, through the single link of his 
teacher Polyearp, stood connected with the age of St. John the 
apostle. 

17 



18 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

beholding Adam and Eve created in the image of their 
Maker, — the crowning glory of all his wonderful works. 
So the second Adam, the Redeemer of the fallen race, 
the Restorer and Perfecter of man, comes first before 
us in the accounts of the Gospels as a child, born, not in 
Paradise, it is true, but among the dreary ruins of 
sin and death ; from a humble virgin, in a lowly manger, 
yet pure and innocent, — the subject of the praise of 
angels and the adoration of men. Even the announce- 
ment and expectation of his birth transforms his virgin 
mother, the bride of the humble carpenter, into an 
inspired prophetess and poetess; rejuvenates the aged 
parents of the Baptist in hopeful anticipation of the 
approaching salvation ; and makes the unborn babe leap 
in Elisabeth's womb, — the babe who was to prepare 
the way for his coming. The immortal psalms of Elisa- 
beth, Mary, and Zacharias combine the irresistible 
charms of poetry with truth, and are a worthy prepar- 
ation for the actual appearance of the Christ-child, at 
the very threshold of the gospel salvation, when the 
highest poetry was to become reality, and reality to 
surpass the sublimest ideal of poetry. 4 And, when the 
heavenly child was born, heaven and earth, the shepherds 
of Bethlehem in the name of Israel longing after sal- 
vation, and the wise men from the East as the repre- 
sentatives of heathenism in its dark groping after the 
"unknown God," unite in the worship of the infant King 
and Saviour. 

Here we meet, at the very beginning of the earthly 
history of Christ, that singular combination of humility 
and grandeur, of simplicity and sublimity, of the human 
and divine, which characterizes it throughout, and dis- 

4 See Luke 1:41-45; the Magnificat, or the Virgin's Song, 
vers, 46-55; the Benedictus, or the Song of Zacharias, vers. 67-79. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19 

tinguishes it from every other history. He appears in 
the world first as a child, as a poor child, in one of the 
smallest towns of a remote country, 5 in one of the lowliest 
spots of that town, in a stable, in a manger, a helpless 
fugitive from the wrath of a cruel tyrant, — thus pre- 
senting, at first sight, every stumbling-block to our faith. 
But, on the other hand, the appearance of the angel, the 
inspired hymns of Zacharias and Mary, the holy exulta- 
tion of Elisabeth, Anna, and Simeon, the prophecies 
of Scripture, the theological lore of the scribes at 
Jerusalem, even the dark political suspicion of Herod, 
the star of Bethlehem, the journey of the Magi from 
the distant East, the dim light of astrology, the signifi- 
cant night-vision of Joseph, and God's providence over- 
ruling every event, — form a glorious array of evidences 
for the divine origin of the Christ-child. Heaven and 
earth seem to move around him as their center. What 
a contrast ! A child in the manger, yet bearing the 
salvation of the world; a child hated and feared, yet 
longed for and loved; a child poor and despised, yet 
honored and adored, — beset by danger, yet marvelously 
preserved; a child setting the stars in heaven, the city 
of Jerusalem, the shepherds of Judaea, and the sages of 
the East in motion, — attracting the best elements of 
the world, and repelling all that is dark and evil ! This 
conception is too deep, too sublime, too significant, to 
be the invention of illiterate fishermen. 

Yet, with all these marks of divinity upon him, the 
infant Saviour is not represented, either by Matthew or 
Luke, as an unnatural prodigy, anticipating the matu- 

* Bethlehem was indeed the ancestral seat of the house of 
David (Ruth 1:1, 2), but remained an insignificant place, and is 
not even mentioned among the towns of Judah in the Hebrew 
text of Joshua, nor in Neh. 11:25. 



20 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

rity of a later age, but as a truly human child, silently 
lying and smiling on the bosom of his virgin mother; 
"growing" and "waxing strong in spirit," 6 and there- 
fore subject to the law of regular development, though 
differing from all other children by his supernatural 
conception and perfect freedom from hereditary sin and 
guilt. He appears in the celestial beauty of unspotted 
innocence, a veritable flower of paradise. He was "that 
Holy Thing," according to the announcement of the 
angel Gabriel (Luke 1: 35), admired and loved by all 
who approached him in a childlike spirit, but exciting the 
dark suspicion of the tyrant king who represented his 
future enemies and persecutors. 

Who can measure the ennobling, purifying, and 
cheering influence which proceeds from the contempla- 
tion of the Christ-child, at each returning Christmas 
season, upon the hearts of young and old in every land 
and nation ! The loss of the first estate is richly compen- 
sated by the undying innocence of paradise regained. 

6. Boyhood. — Of the boyhood of Jesus we know only 
one fact, recorded by Luke ; but it is in perfect keeping 
with the peculiar charm of his childhood, and foreshad- 
ows at the same time the glory of his public life as one 
uninterrupted service of his heavenly Father. When 
twelve years old, we find him in the Temple, in the midst 
of the Jewish doctors ; not teaching and offending them 
by any immodesty or forwardness, but hearing and ask- 
ing questions: thus actually learning from them, and 
yet filling them with astonishment at his understanding 
and answers. There is nothing premature, forced, or 
unbecoming his age, and yet a degree of wisdom and an 

e Luke 2:40, "And the child grew and waxed strong in 
spirit;" precisely the same expression which Luke used, 1:80, of 
John the Baptist. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21 

intensity of interest in religion which rises far above 
a purely human youth. "He increased," we are told, 
"in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" 
(Luke 2:52). He was subject to his parents, and 
practised all the virtues of an obedient son ; and yet he 
filled them with a sacred awe as they saw him absorbed 
in "the things of his Father," 7 and heard him utter 
words which they were unable to understand at the 
time, but which Mary treasured up in her heart as a 
holy secret, convinced that they must have some deep 
meaning answering to the mystery of his supernatural 
conception and birth. 

Such an idea of a harmless and faultless heavenly 
childhood, of a growing, inquiring, and yet surpris- 
ingly wise boyhood, as it meets us in living reality at 
the portal of the gospel history, never entered the 
imagination of biographer, poet, or philosopher before. 
On the contrary, as has been justly observed, 8 "in all 
the higher ranges of character, the excellence portrayed 
is never the simple unfolding of a harmonious and per- 
fect beauty contained in the germ of childhood, but is 
a character formed by a process of rectification in which 
many follies are mended and distempers removed; in 
which confidence is checked by defeat, passion moderated 
by reason, smartness sobered by experience. Commonly 
a certain pleasure is taken in showing how the many 
wayward sallies of the boy are, at length, reduced by 
discipline to the character of wisdom, justice, and 
public heroism so much admired. Besides, if any 
writer, of almost any age, will undertake to describe, 
not merely a spotless but a superhuman or celestial child- 
hood, not having the reality before him, he must be 

T See Luke 2:49, R. V. margin. 

8 Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 280. 



22 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

somewhat more than human himself if he does not pile 
together a mass of clumsy exaggerations, and draw 
and overdraw, till neither heaven nor earth can find 
any verisimilitude in the picture." 

This unnatural exaggeration, into which the myth- 
ical fancy of man, in its endeavor to produce a super- 
human childhood and boyhood, will inevitably fall, is 
strikingly exhibited in the myth of Hercules, who, while 
yet a suckling in the cradle, squeezed two monster 
serpents to death with his tender hands ; and still more 
in the accounts of the apocryphal Gospels on the prodig- 
ious performances of the infant Saviour. These apocrj^- 
phal Gospels are related to the canonical Gospels as a 
counterfeit to the genuine coin, or as a caricature to 
the inimitable original; but, by the very contrast, they 
tend, negatively, to corroborate the truth of the evan- 
gelical history. The strange contrast has been fre- 
quently urged, especially in the Strauss-controversy, 
and used as an argument against the mythical theory. 
While the Evangelists expressly reserve the performance 
of miracles to the age of maturity and public life, and 
observe a significant silence concerning the parents of 
Jesus, the pseudo-evangelists fill the infancy and early 
years of the Saviour and his mother with the strangest 
prodigies, and make the active intercession of Mary very 
prominent throughout. According to their representa- 
tion, even dumb idols, irrational beasts, and senseless 
trees bow in adoration before the infant Jesus on his 
journey to Egypt; and after his return, when yet a boy 
of five or seven years, he changes balls of clay into flying 
birds for the idle amusement of his playmates, strikes 
terror round about him, dries up a stream of water by a 
mere word, transforms his companions into goats, raises 
the dead to life, and performs all sorts of miraculous 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23 

cures through a magical influence which proceeds from 
the very water in which he was washed, the towels which 
he used, and the bed on which he slept. 

Here we have the falsehood and absurdity of un- 
natural fiction ; while the New Testament presents to us 
the truth and beauty of a supernatural yet most real 
history, which shines out only in brighter colors by the 
contrast of the mythical shadow. 



CHAPTER III 
TRAINING 



7. WITHOUT ADVANTAGE OF SCHOOLS OR LARGE 

INFLUENCES. Humble location at Nazareth. No 
natural cause for final result. 

8. CONTRAST WITH LUTHER AND SHAKESPEARE. 

Luther the son of poor peasants. But he had schools, 
professors, libraries. Shakespeare, a Warwickshire 
youth. Yet had access to books and lived in London. 

9. CHRIST'S INDEPENDENT AUTHORITY. Christ ac- 

quainted with only the Old Testament. He confined 
himself strictly to religion. Yet sheds light over 
whole world of man and nature. Speaks from divine 
intuition and is the truth. Has an authority that 
commands attention. 

With the exception of these few significant hints, the 
youth of Jesus, and the preparation for his public 
ministry, are enshrined in mysterious silence. But we 
know the outward condition and circumstances under 
which he grew up ; and these furnish no explanation for 
the astounding results, without the admission of the 
supernatural and divine element in his life. 

7. Without Advantage of Schools or Large In- 
fluences. — Jesus lived among a people who are seldom 
and only contemptuously named by the ancient classics, 
and were subjected at the time to the yoke of a foreign 
oppressor. He grew up in a remote and conquered 
province of the Roman Empire; in the darkest district 
of Palestine; in a country town of proverbial insignifi- 

24 



TRAINING 25 

cance. He spent his youth in poverty and manual 
labor, in the obscurity of a carpenter's shop; far away 
from universities, academies, libraries, and literary or 
polished society. He had no opportunities, except the 
parental care, the daily wonders of nature, the Old 
Testament Scriptures, the weekly Sabbath services of 
the synagogue (Luke 4: 16), the annual festivals in 
Jerusalem (Luke 2: 42), and the secret intercourse of 
his soul with God. These are indeed the great educators 
of the mind and heart. The book of Nature and the book 
of Revelation are filled with richer and more important 
lessons than all the works of human art and learning; 
but they were accessible alike to every Jew, and gave 
no advantage to Jesus over his humblest neighbor. 

Hence the question of Nathanael: "Can any good 
thing come out of Nazareth?" Hence the natural sur- 
prise of the Jews, who knew all his human relations and 
antecedents. "How knoweth this man letters," they 
asked when they heard Jesus teach, "having never 
learned?" (John 7 : 15.) And on another occasion, when 
he taught in the synagogue : "Whence hath this man this 
wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the car- 
penter's son? Is not his mother Mary? and his breth- 
ren, James and Joses and Simon and Judas? And his 
sisters — are they not all with us? Whence, then, hath 
this man all these things?" 9 These questions are un- 
avoidable and unanswerable, if Christ be regarded as a 
mere man ; for each eff ect presupposes a corresponding 
cause. 

The difficulty here presented can by no means be 
solved by a reference to the fact that many, perhaps 
the majority of great men, have risen, by their own 

•Matt. 13:54-56. Compare also Mark 6:3. 



26 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

industry and perseverance, from the lower walks of life, 
and from a severe contest with poverty and obstacles of 
every kind. The fact itself is readily conceded; but, 
in every one of these cases, schools and books, or patrons 
and friends, or peculiar events and influences, can be 
pointed out as auxiliary aids in the development of intel- 
lectual or moral greatness. There is always some human 
and natural cause, or combination of causes, which 
accounts for the final result. 

8. Contrast with Luther and Shakespeare. — Luther, 
for instance, was indeed the son of poor peasants, and 
had a very hard youth: but he went to the schools of 
Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach; to the university 
of Erfurt; passed through the ascetic discipline of con- 
vent life; studied and labored among professors, stu- 
dents, and libraries ; and was innocently, as it were, made 
a reformer by extraordinary events, and the irresistible 
current of his age. 

Shakespeare is generally and justly regarded as the 
most remarkable and most wonderful example of a selfr 
taught man; who, without the regular routine of school 
education, became the greatest dramatic poet, not only 
of his age and country, but of all times. But the absurd 
idea that the son of the Warwickshire yeoman or butcher 
or glover — we hardly know which — was essentially an 
unlearned man, and jumped with one bound from the 
youthful folly of deer-stealing to the highest position in 
literature, has long since been abandoned by competent 
judges. It is certain that he spent several years in the 
free grammar-school of Stratford-on-Avon, where he 
probably acquired the "small Latin, and less Greek," 
which, however small in the eyes of so profound 
a classical scholar as Ben Jonson, was certainly 
large enough to unfold to him a general under- 



TRAINING 27 

standing of Greek and Roman antiquity. And, 
whatever were the defects of his scholastic training, 
he must have made them up, by intense private 
study of books, and the closest observation of men and 
things: for his dramas — the occasional chronological, 
historical, and geographical mistakes notwithstanding, 
which are small matters at all events, and in most cases, 
as in "Pericles" and in "Midsummer-Night's Dream," 
either intentional, or mere freaks of fancy — abound in 
the most accurate and comprehensive knowledge of 
human nature under all its types and conditions, — in 
the cold North and the sunny South; in the fifteenth 
century, and at the time of Csesar, under the influence of 
Christianity and of Judaism, — together with a great 
variety of historical and other information, which can- 
not be acquired without study, and the help of oral or 
printed instruction. Moreover, he lived in the city of 
London ; united the offices of actor, manager, and writer, 
in the classic age of Elizabeth, in the company of genial 
and gifted friends, with free access to the highest ranks 
of blood, wealth, and wit, and during the closing scenes 
of the greatest upheaving of the human mind which ever 
took place since the introduction of Christianity. 

9. Christ's Independent Authority. — In the case of 
Christ, no such natural explanation can be given. He 
can be ranked neither with school-trained, nor with self- 
trained or self-made men ; if by the latter we understand, 
as we must, those who, without the regular aid of living 
teachers, yet with the same educational means, such as 
books, the observation of men and things, and the in- 
tense application of their mental faculties, attained to 
vigor of intellect, and wealth of scholarship, — like 
Shakespeare, Jacob Boehm, Benjamin Franklin, and 
others. The attempts to bring him into contact with 



28 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

Egyptian wisdom, or the Essenic theosophy, or other 
sources of learning, are without a shadow of proof, and 
explain nothing after all. He never quotes from books, 
except the Old Testament. He never refers to secular 
history, poetry, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, for- 
eign languages, natural sciences, discoveries and inven- 
tions, or any of those branches of knowledge which makq 
up human learning and literature. He confined him- 
self strictly to religion. But, from that center, he sheds 
light over the whole world of man and nature, and acts 
as a universal inspirer of higher and purer thought. 
In this department, unlike all other great men, even the 
prophets and the apostles, he is absolutely original and 
independent. He teaches the world as one who had 
learned nothing from it, and is under no obligation to 
it. He speaks from divine intuition, as one who not only 
knows the truth, but is the truth ; and with an authority 
that commands absolute submission, or provokes rebel- 
lion, but can never be passed by with contempt or 
indifference. "His character and life were originated 
and sustained in spite of circumstances with which no 
earthly force could have contended, and therefore must 
have had their real foundation in a force which was 
preternatural and divine." 10 

At the same time, it is easy to see, from the admis- 
sion of Christ's divinity, that by this condescension he 
raised humble origin, poverty, manual labor, and the 
lower orders of society, to a dignity and sacredness never 
known before. He set up the true standard of judging 
men and things not from their outward appearance, but 
from their intrinsic merits. 

10 John Young, The Christ of History, p. 35. 



CHAPTER IV 
PUBLIC LIFE 



10. FRESH AND ORIGINAL TEACHING. Christ did all 

in the fresh vigor of early manhood. His gospel 
never wearies nor is exhausted. Tributes of Napoleon 
and Ewald, 

11. WISDOM AND MODERATION. The triennium of his 

ministry has boundless historic meaning. Contrast of 
Alexander's career. 

12. HUMBLE, QUIET BEARING. He moved in the circle 

of every-day life. Selected disciples from the lowly. 

13. IMMEASURABLE SUCCESS AND GREATNESS. 

Christ produces incalculable effects. He now controls 
the destinies of the civilized world. An unsolvable 
problem unless he is the Son of God. 

We now approach the public life of Jesus. In his 
thirtieth year, after the Messianic inauguration through 
the baptism by John as his forerunner, and as the rep- 
resentative of the Old Covenant, both in its legal and 
prophetic or evangelical aspects, and after the Messianic 
probation by the temptation in the wilderness, — the 
counterpart of the temptation of the first Adam in 
paradise, — he entered upon his great work. 

10. Fresh and Original Teaching. — His public life 
lasted only three years ; and before he had reached the 
age of ordinary maturity he died, in the full beauty 
and vigor of early manhood, without tasting the infir- 
mities of declining years. He retained the dew of his 
youth upon him: he never became an old man. Both 
his person and his work, every word he spoke, and every 



30 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

act he performed, have the freshness, brilliance, and 
vigor of youth, and will retain them to the end of time. 
All other things fade away ; every book of man loses its 
interest after repeated reading : but the gospel of Jesus 
never wearies; it becomes more interesting the more it 
is read, and grows deeper at every attempt to fathom 
its depth. Even Napoleon is reported to have said on 
St. Helena, pointing to a copy of the Testament on 
his table: "I never tire with reading it, and I read it 
daily with equal delight. The gospel is not a book, 
but a living power which overwhelms every opposing 
force. The soul which is captivated by the beauty 
of the gospel does no more belong to itself or to the 
world, but to God. What an evidence is this of the 
divinity of Christ!" The great Orientalist, Henry 
Ewald, holding a Greek Testament in his hand, said to 
a friend: "In this little book is contained the whole 
wisdom of the world." 

11. Wisdom and Moderation. — And yet, unlike all 
other men of his years, Christ combined, with the fresh- 
ness, energy, and originating power of youth, that wis- 
dom, moderation, and experience, which belong only to 
mature age. The short triennium of his public ministry 
contains more, even from a purely historical point of 
observation, than the longest life of the greatest and 
best of men. It is pregnant with the deepest meaning 
of the counsel of God and the destiny of the race. It 
is the ripe fruit of all preceding ages, the fulfilment of 
the hopes and desires of the Jewish and heathen mind, 
and the fruitful germ of succeeding generations. It 
contains the impulse to the purest thoughts and noblest 
actions down to the end of time. It is "the end of a 
boundless past, the center of a boundless present, and 
the beginning of a boundless future/' 



PUBLIC LIFE SI 

How remarkable, how wonderful, this contrast be- 
tween the short duration and the immeasurable signifi- 
cance of Christ's ministry! The Saviour of the world 
a youth! 

Other men require a long succession of years to 
mature their mind and character, and to make a lasting 
impression upon the world. There are exceptions, we 
admit. Alexander the Great, the last and most brilliant 
efflorescence of the ancient Greek nationality, died a 
young man of thirty-three, after having conquered the 
East to the borders of the Indus. But who would think 
of comparing an ambitious warrior, conquered by his 
own lust, and dying a victim of his passion, with the 
spotless Friend of sinners? a few bloody victories of the 
one with the peaceful triumphs of the other ; and a huge 
military empire of force, which crumbled to pieces as 
soon as it was erected, with the spiritual kingdom of 
truth and love which stands to this day, and will last 
forever? Nor should it be forgotten that the true 
significance and only value of Alexander's conquest lay 
beyond the horizon of his ambition and intention; and 
that by carrying the language and civilization of Greece 
to Asia, and bringing together the Oriental and Occi- 
dental world, it prepared the way for the introduction of 
the universal religion of Christ, who occupies the central 
position in history, all the preceding ages looking 
toward him as the fulfilment of their hopes and aspira- 
tions, all succeeding ages starting from him to carry 
out the design of his coming. Napoleon, in his con- 
versations with General Bertrand at St. Helena, made 
the striking remark: "The world admires the conquest 
of Alexander; but Christ is a conqueror who attracts, 
unites to himself, and incorporates with him, for its own 
benefit, not a nation, — no, but the whole human race. 



32 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

What a miracle ! The human soul, with all its faculties, 
becomes an annex to the existence of Christ." 

12. Humble, Quiet Bearing. — There is another strik- 
ing distinction of a general character, between Christ 
and the heroes of history, which we must notice here. 
We should naturally suppose that such an uncommon 
personage, setting up the most astounding claims and 
proposing the most extraordinary work, would surround 
himself with extraordinary circumstances, and maintain 
a position far above the vulgar and degraded multitude 
around him. We should expect something uncommon 
and striking in his look, his dress, his manner, his mode 
of speech, his outward life, and the train of his at- 
tendants. 

But the very reverse is the case. His greatness is 
singularly unostentatious, modest, and quiet; and, far 
from repelling the beholder, it attracts and invites him 
to familiar approach. His public life never moved on 
the imposing arena of secular heroism, but within the 
humble circle of every-day life, and the simple relations 
of a son, a brother, a citizen, a teacher, and a friend. 
We have no authentic description of his "human face 
divine;" he had not the physiognomy of a sinner, and 
"the glory of the only Begotten of the Father full of 
grace and truth" must have shone through the veil of 
his flesh, but it was perceptible only to a deeper pene- 
tration, and his outward dress and appearance, if we 
are to judge from the absence of all observations on the 
subject, had nothing startling or uncommon. He had 
no army to command, no kingdom to rule, no prominent 
station to fill, no worldly favors and rewards to dispense. 
He was a humble individual, without friends and patrons 
in the Sanhedrin or at the court of Herod. He never 
mingled in familiar intercourse with the religious or 



PUBLIC LIFE 38 

social leaders of the nation, whom he had startled in 
his twelfth year by his questions and answers. He 
selected his disciples from among the illiterate fishermen 
of Galilee, and promised them no reward in this world 
but a part in the bitter cup of his sufferings. He dined 
with publicans and sinners, and mingled with the com- 
mon people, without ever condescending to their low 
manners and habits. He was so poor that he had no 
place on which to rest his head. He depended, for the 
supply of his modest wants, on the voluntary contribu- 
tions of a few pious women; and the purse was in the 
hands of a thief and a traitor. Nor had he learning, art, 
or eloquence, in the usual sense of the term, or any 
other kind of power by which great men arrest the 
attention and secure the admiration of the world. The 
writers of Greece and Rome were ignorant even of his 
existence, until, several years after the crucifixion, the 
effects of his mission, in the steady growth of the sect 
of his followers, forced from them some contemptuous 
notice, and then roused them to opposition. 

13. Immeasurable Success and Greatness. — And 
yet this Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, 
conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mo- 
hammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning, 
he shed more light on things human and divine than all 
philosophers and scholars combined; without the elo- 
quence of schools, he spoke such words of life as were 
never spoken before or since, and produced effects which 
lie beyond the reach of orator or poet ; without writing 
a single line, he set more pens in motion, and furnished 
themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned 
volumes, works of art, and songs of praise, than the 
whole army of great men of ancient and modern times. 
Born in a manger, and crucified as a malefactor, he 



34 THE PERSON OP CHRIST 

now controls the destinies of the civilized world, and rules 
a spiritual empire which embraces one third of the 
inhabitants of the globe. There never was in this world 
a life so unpretending, modest, and lowly in its outward 
form and condition, and yet producing such extraordi- 
nary effects upon all ages, nations, and classes of men. 
The annals of history furnish no other example of such 
complete and astounding success, in spite of the absence 
of those material, social, literary, and artistic powers 
and influences which are indispensable to success for a 
mere man. Christ stands, in this respect also, solitary 
and alone among all the heroes of history, and presents 
to us an unsolvable problem, unless we admit him to be 
more than man, even the eternal Son of God. 

We will now attempt to describe his personal or 
moral and religious character as it appears in the 
record of his public life, and then examine his own 
testimony of himself as giving us the only rational so- 
lution of this mighty problem. 



CHAPTER V 
FREEDOM FROM SIN 



14. SUBJECT TO TEMPTATION. Tempted, but never yield- 

ing. Heal freedom, or the power of choice. 

15. FULLY RESISTING TEMPTATION. Christ's relative 

sinlessness became absolute sinlessness. He attained 
a moral impossibility of sinning. 

16. A SINLESS RECORD. He shows no wrong or sin. He 

is positively just and holy. 

17. HE WAS CONSCIOUSLY SINLESS. 

18. THE SOLITARY EXCEPTION AMONG SINNERS. 

Christ differed from all others not in degree only, but 
in kind. The sublime moral miracle of history. 

The first impression which we receive from the life 
of Jesus is that of perfect innocency and sinlessness in 
the midst of a sinful world. He, and he alone, carried 
the spotless purity of childhood untarnished through his 
youth and manhood. Hence the lamb and the dove are 
his appropriate symbols. 

14. Subject to Temptation. — He was, indeed, tempt- 
ed as we are ; but he never yielded to temptation. n His 
sinlessness was at first only the relative sinlessness of 
Adam before the Fall; which implies the necessity of 
trial and temptation, and the peccability, or the possi- 
bility of sinning. Had he been endowed from the start 
with absolute impeccability, or with the impossibility of 

11 Comp. with the history of the temptation in the wilderness, 
Matt. 4 and Luke 4, the significant passage in Hebrews 4:15, 
"Tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin" 

35 



36 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

sinning, he could not be a true man, nor our model for 
imitation: his holiness, instead of being his own self- 
acquired act and inherent merit, would be an accidental 
or outward gift, and his temptation an unreal show. As 
a true man, Christ must have been a free and responsible 
moral agent : freedom implies the power of choice between 
good and evil, and the power of disobedience as well 
as obedience to the law of God. 

15. Fully Resisting Temptation. — But here is the 
great fundamental difference between the first and the 
second Adam: the first Adam lost his innocence by the 
abuse of his freedom, and fell, by his own act of dis- 
obedience, into the dire necessity of sin ; while the second 
Adam was innocent in the midst of sinners, and main- 
tained his innocence against all and every temptation. 
Christ's relative sinlessness became absolute sinlessness 
by his own moral act, or the right use of his freedom in 
perfect active and passive obedience to God. In other 
words, Christ's original possibility of not sinning, which 
includes the opposite possibility of sinning, but excludes 
the actuality of sin, was unfolded into the impossibility 
of siwning, which cannot sin because it mil not. This 
is the highest stage of freedom where it becomes 
identical with moral necessity, or absolute and un- 
changeable self-determination for goodness and holiness. 
This is the freedom of God, and also of the saints in 
heaven; with this difference, that the saints obtain that 
position by deliverance and salvation from sin and death, 
while Christ acquired it by his own merit. 

16. A Sinless Record. — In vain do we look through 
the entire biography of Jesus for a single stain or the 
slightest shadow on his moral character. There never 
lived a more harmless being on earth. He injured no- 
body, he took advantage of nobody. He never spoke an 



FREEDOM FROM SIN 37 

improper word, he never committed a wrong action. He 
exhibited a uniform elevation above the objects, opinions, 
pleasures, and passions of this world, and disregard 
to riches, displays, fame, and favor of men. "No vice 
that has a name can be thought of in connection with 
Jesus Christ. Ingenious malignity looks in vain for the 
faintest trace of self -seeking in his motives; sensuality 
shrinks abashed from his celestial purity ; falsehood can 
leave no stain on him who is incarnate truth; injustice 
is forgotten beside his errorless equity; the very possi- 
bility of avarice is swallowed up in his benignity and 
love; the very idea of ambition is lost in his divine wis- 
dom and divine self-abnegation." 12 

The apparent outbreak of passion in the expul- 
sion of the profane traffickers from the Temple is the 
only instance on the record of his history which might 
be quoted against his freedom from the faults of hu- 
manity. But the very effect which it produced shows 
that, far from being the outburst of passion, the expul- 
sion was a judicial act of a religious reformer, vindi- 
cating, in just and holy zeal, the honor of the Lord of 
the Temple. It was an exhibition, not of weakness, 
but of dignity and majesty, which at once silenced the 
offenders, though they were superior in physical 
strength, and made them submit to their well-deserved 
punishment without a murmur. They were overawed by 
the presence of a superhuman power. The cursing of 
the unfruitful fig-tree can still less be urged; as it 
evidently was a significant symbolical act, foreshadowing 
the fearful doom of the impenitent Jews in the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. On the contrary, these two facts 
become fully intelligible only by the assumption of the 
presence of the Divinity in Christ; for they represent 

"Peter Bayne, The Testimony of Christ to Christianity, p. 105. 



38 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

him as the Lord of the Temple, and as the Lord of 
creation. 

The perfect innocence of Jesus is based, not only 
negatively on the absence of any recorded word or act 
to the contrary, and his exemption from every trace of 
selfishness and worldliness, but positively also, on the 
unanimous testimony of John the Baptist, and the 
apostles who bowed before the majesty of his character 
in unbounded veneration, and declared him "just," 
"holy," and "without sin." 13 It is admitted, moreove^, 
by his enemies, — the heathen judge Pilate, and his wife, 
representing, as it were, the Roman law and justice when 
they shuddered with fear, and when Pilate washed 
his hands to be clear of innocent blood; by the rude 
Roman centurion confessing under the cross, in the 
name of the disinterested spectators: "Truly this was 
a Son of God;" and by Judas himself, the witness of 
his whole public and private life, when he exclaimed in 
despair : "I sinned in betraying innocent blood." 14 
Even dumb nature responded in mysterious sympathy; 
and the beclouded heavens above, and the shaking earth 
beneath, united in paying their unconscious tribute to 
the divine purity of their dying Lord. 

The objection that the Evangelists were either not 
fully informed concerning the facts, or mistaken in 
their estimate of the character of Christ, is of no avail. 
For, in addition to their testimony, we have his own 
personal conviction of entire freedom from sin; which 
leaves us only the choice between absolute purity and 
absolute hypocrisy: such hypocrisy as would be the 
greatest moral monstrosity on record. 

"Comp. Acts 3:14; 1 Pet. 1:19; 9:22; 3:18; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 
John 2:29; 3:5, 7; Heb. 4:15; 7:26. 

"Matt. 27:19, 24-54$ Luke 23; 22-47$ Matt. 27:4, 



FREEDOM FROM SIN 39 

17. Consciously Sinless.— The very fact that Christ 
came for the express purpose of saving sinners, implies 
his own consciousness of personal freedom from guilt 
and from all need of salvation. And this is the impres- 
sion made upon us by his public life and conduct. He 
nowhere shows the least concern for his own salvation, 
but knows himself to be in undisturbed harmony with his 
heavenly Father. While calling most earnestly upon 
all other men to repent, he stood in no need of con- 
version and regeneration, but simply of the regular 
harmonious unfolding of his moral powers. While di- 
recting all his followers, in his model prayer, to ask for 
the forgiveness of their sins as well as their daily bread, 
he himself never asked God for pardon and forgiveness 
except in behalf of others. While freely conversing with 
sinners, he always did so with the love and interest of a 
Saviour of sinners. He always did so : this is the his- 
torical fact, no matter how you may explain it. And, 
to remove every doubt, we have his open and fearless 
challenge to his bitter enemies : "Which of you con- 
victeth me of sin?" (John 8: 46.) In this question, 
which remains unanswered to this day, he clearly ex- 
empts himself from the common fault and guilt of the 
race. In the mouth of any other man, this question 
would at once betray either the height of hypocrisy, or 
a degree of self-deception bordering on madness itself, 
and would overthrow the very foundation of all human 
goodness ; while, from the mouth of Jesus, we instinc- 
tively receive it as the triumphant self-vindication of one 
who stood far above the possibility of successful im- 
peachment or founded suspicion. 

The assumption that Christ was a sinner, and knew 
himself such, although he professed the contrary, and 
made upon friends and enemies the impression of spot- 



40 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

less innocency, is the most monstrous deception that can 
well be imagined. "If Jesus was a sinner, he was con- 
scious of sin as all sinners are, and therefore was a hypo- 
crite in the whole fabric of his character; realizing so 
much of divine beauty in it, maintaining the show of 
such unfaltering harmony and celestial grace, and doing 
all this with a mind confused and fouled by the affecta- 
tions acted for true virtues! Such an example of suc- 
cessful hypocrisy would be itself the greatest miracle 
ever heard of in the world." 15 

18. The Solitary Exception among Sinners. — It is 
an indisputable fact, then, both from his mission and 
uniform conduct, and his express declaration, that Christ 
knew himself free from sin and guilt. The only rational 
explanation of this fact is that Christ was no sinner. 
And this is readily conceded by the greatest divines, even 
those who are by no means regarded as orthodox. 16 
The admission of this fact implies the further admission, 
that Christ differed from all other men, not in degree 
only, but in kind. For although we must utterly repu- 
diate the pantheistic notion of the necessity of sin, and 
maintain that human nature in itself considered is 
capable of sinlessness, that it was sinless, in fact, before 
the Fall, and that it will ultimately become sinless again 
by the redemption of Christ, — yet it is equally certain 
that human nature in its present condition is not sin- 
less, and never has been since the Fall, except in the 
single case of Christ; and that, for this very reason, 
Christ's sinlessness can only be explained on the ground 
of such an extraordinary indwelling of God in him as 
never took place in any other human being before or 
after. 

15 Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 325. 

16 Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Olaube, Vol. II, p. 78. 



FREEDOM FROM SIN 41 

The Bible, the conscience of man, and the daily 
experience of life, unite in testifying to the universal 
fact of sin, no matter how we may explain it. Sin is 
the deep, dark mystery of history, the stumbling-block 
to reason, the problem of problems, the fruitful source 
of all misery and woe. The literature of all nations 
and ages is full of lamentations over this most awful 
and most stubborn of all facts. Even heathen philoso- 
phers, historians, and poets acknowledge it. "The evil 
passions," says Plutarch, "are inborn in man, and were 
not introduced from without; and, if strict discipline 
would not come to aid, man would hardly be tamer than 
the wildest beast." The well-known line of the Roman 

poet: 

"Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor;" 

and that other: 

"Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata," 

have often been quoted as a striking response of the 
heathen conscience and experience to the inspired 
description of the moral conflict between heaven and hell 
in every soul (Rom. 7). And as to the actual condition 
of morals in the age of Christ and the apostles, Seneca, 
Tacitus, Persius, and Juvenal give the most unfavorable 
accounts, which fully corroborate the dark picture of 
St. Paul in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. 
"All is full of crime and vice," says Seneca; "they are 
open and manifest : iniquity prevails in every heart, and 
innocence has not only become rare, but has entirely 
disappeared." Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher 
on the throne and the persecutor of Christians, complains 
that "faithfulness, the sense of honor, righteousness, and 
truth, have taken their flight from the wide earth to 
heaven." 



42 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

If this is the testimony of the sages of heathenism, 
what shall we say of the Christian, whose sense of sin 
and guilt is deepened and sharpened in proportion to 
his knowledge of God's holiness and his experience of 
God's redeeming grace? The entire Christian world, 
Greek, Latin, and Protestant, agree in the scriptural 
doctrine of the universal depravity of human nature 
since the apostasy of the first Adam. The modern dog- 
ma of the Roman Catholic Church, that the Virgin Mary 
was free from hereditary as well as actual sin, might be 
quoted as an exception ; but her sinlessness is explained, 
in the papal decision of 1854, by the assumption of a 
miraculous interposition of divine favor, and by the 
reflex influence of the merits of her Son. There is not 
a single mortal who has not to charge himself with 
some defect or folly ; and man's consciousness of sin and 
un worthiness deepens just in proportion to his self- 
knowledge, and progress in virtue and goodness. There 
is not a single saint who has not experienced a new birth 
from above, and an actual conversion from sin to holi- 
ness, and who does not feel daily the need of repentance 
and divine forgiveness. The very greatest and best of 
them, as St. Paul and St. Augustine, passed through a 
violent struggle and a radical revolution; and their 
whole theological system and religious experience rest 
on the felt antagonism of sin and grace. 

But in Christ we have the one solitary and absolute 
exception to this universal rule, — an individual think- 
ing like a man, feeling like a man, speaking, acting, suf- 
fering, and dying like a man, surrounded by sinners in 
every direction, with the keenest sense of sin, and the 
deepest sympathy with sinners, commencing his public 
ministry with the call : "Repent ; for the kingdom of 
heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4: 17) ; yet never touched ia 



FREEDOM FROM SIN 43 

the least by the contamination of the world ; never put- 
ting himself in the attitude of a sinner before God; 
never shedding a tear of repentance ; never regretting a 
single thought, word, or deed; never needing or asking 
divine pardon; never concerned about the salvation of 
his own soul; and boldly facing all his present and fu- 
ture enemies, in the absolute certainty of his spotless 
purity before God and man. 

* A sinless Saviour, surrounded by a sinful world, is 
an astounding fact indeed; a sublime moral miracle in 
history. But this freedom from the common sin and 
guilt of the race is, after all, only the negative side 
of his character; which rises in magnitude as we con- 
template the positive side, — namely, his absolute moral 
and religious perfection. 



CHAPTER VI 
PERFECT HOLINESS 



19. CHRIST WAS HOLY IN CONDUCT. Words are noth- 

ing unless supported by deeds. Christ lived his own 
doctrine. The verdicts of Theodore Parker and Renan. 

20. HE WAS HOLY IN ALL RELATIONS. Even marriage 

and fatherhood have their spiritual counterparts in 
him. He was seen in all situations, and sustained 
the same consistent character throughout. Guizot's 
thought as to Christ's unchangeable spirit. Finishes 
the work given him to do. 

It is universally admitted, even by deists and ration- 
alists, that Christ taught the purest and sublimest sys- 
tem of ethics, one which throws the moral precepts and 
maxims of the wisest men of antiquity far into the shade. 
The Sermon on the Mount alone is worth infinitely more 
than all that Confucius, Sakya-Muni, Zoroaster, Socra- 
tes, and Seneca ever said or wrote on duty and virtue. 
Men of the world can hardly resist its power. Napoleon 
Bonaparte had it once read to him and his friends in 
the solitude of exile by a son of Count De Las Cases, 
and "expressed himself struck with the highest admira- 
tion of the purity, the sublimity, the beauty of the 
morality which it contained." De Las Cases, who relates 
this fact in his Memoires, adds: "We all experienced 
the same feeling." 

19. Holy in Conduct. — But the difference between 
Christ and the moralists of ancient or modern times is 
still greater if we come to the more difficult task of 

44 



PERFECT HOLINESS 45 

practice. All the systems of moral philosophy combined 
could not regenerate the world. Words are nothing 
unless they are supported by deeds. A holy life is a 
greater power for good than the finest moral maxim or 
essay. In this respect, the difference between Jesus and 
the great sages is so radical and fundamental, that com- 
parison ceases. Cicero, who, with all his excessive vanity, 
was one of the noblest and purest of old Roman char- 
acters, confessed that he never found a perfect sage in 
his life, and that philosophy only taught how he ought 
to be if he should ever appear on earth. It is well 
known that the wise men of Greece and Rome sanctioned 
slavery, oppression, revenge, infanticide or exposure of 
infants, polygamy, concubinage, and worse vices ; or, 
like the avaricious and venal Seneca, belied their purer 
moral maxims by their conduct. The greatest saints of 
the Old Testament, even with the help of divine grace, 
did not rise above reproach ; and some of them are stained 
with the guilt of blood and adultery. It may be safely 
asserted, that the wisest and best of men, even among 
Christian nations, never live up to their own imperfect 
standard of excellency. 

But how is it with Christ? He fully carried out 
his perfect doctrine in his life and conduct. He both 
was and did that which he taught: he preached his own 
life, and lived his own doctrine. He is the living incarna- 
tion of the ideal standard of virtue and holiness, and 
the highest model for all that is pure and good and 
noble in the sight of God and man. 

Even unbelievers must admit this fact. "Christ 
unites in himself," says Theodore Parker, "the sublimest 
precepts and divinest practices, thus more than realizing 
the dream of prophets and sages ; rises free from all 
prejudice of his age, nation, or sect; gives free range 



46 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

to the Spirit of God in his breast; sets aside the law, 
sacred and true, honored as it was, — its forms, its sacri- 
fice, its temple, its priests; puts away the doctors of 
the law, — subtle, irrefragable ; and pours out a doctrine 
beautiful as the light, sublime as heaven, and true as 
God." 17 And Renan, much as he perverts the life and 
character of Jesus, freely acknowledges, that both in 
word and in work, in the doctrine and practice of mo- 
rality, the hero of Nazareth "is without equal;" that 
"his glory remains perfect, and will be renewed forever." 
20. In All Relations. — We find Christ moving in all 
ordinary and essential relations of life, 18 as a son, a 
brother, a friend, a citizen, a teacher, at home and in 
public. We find him among all classes of society, — with 
sinners and saints ; with the poor and the wealthy ; with 
the sick and the healthy; with little children, grown 
men and women; with plain fishermen and learned 
scribes; with despised publicans and honored members 
of the Sanhedrin ; with friends and foes ; with admiring 
disciples and bitter persecutors ; now with an individual, 
as Nicodemus or the woman of Samaria; now in the 
familiar circle of the twelve; now in the crowds of the 
people. We find him in all situations, — in the syna- 
gogue and the Temple; at home and on journeys; in 
villages and the city of Jerusalem; in the desert and 
on the mountain; along the banks of the Jordan and 
the shores of the Galilean Sea; at the joyous wedding- 
feast and the solemn grave; in the awful agony of 
Gethsemane; in the judgment-hall, before the high- 

17 Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, p. 294. 

18 The relation of husband and father must be excepted, on ac- 
count of his elevation above all equal partnership, and the uni- 
versalness of his character and mission which requires the entire 
community of the redeemed as his bride instead of any individ- 
ual daughter of Eve. 



PERFECT HOLINESS 47 

priest, the king, the Roman governor, rude soldiers, 
and the fanatical multitude; and at last in the bitter 
pains of the cross on Calvary. 

In all these various relations, conditions, and situ- 
ations, as they are crowded within the few years of 
his public ministry, he sustains the same consistent 
character throughout, without ever exposing himself to 
censure. As God, according to the Bible, is one and the 
same always, so also is Christ, according to the gospel. 
Guizot (in his Meditations on the Essence of the Chris- 
tian Religion) justly remarks: "The most perfect, the 
most constant unity reigns in Jesus, in his life as in 
his soul, in his words as in his acts. He progresses 
according to the circumstances in which he lives ; but 
his progress produces in him no change of character 
or design. As he appeared already in his twelfth year 
in the Temple, full of the sense of his divine nature; so 
he remains and manifests himself during the whole course 
of his public mission. . . . Everywhere, and under all 
circumstances, he is animated by the same spirit, he sheds 
the same light, he proclaims the same law." He fulfils 
every duty to God, to man, and to himself, with perfect 
ease and freedom, and exhibits an entire conformity to 
the law, in the spirit as well as the letter. His life is 
one unbroken service of God in active and passive obe- 
dience to his holy will; one grand act of absolute love 
to God and love to man; of personal self-consecration 
to the glory of his heavenly Father, and the salvation 
of a fallen race. In the language of the people who were 
"beyond measure astonished" at his works, we must say, 
the more we study his life: "He hath done all things 
well" (Mark 7:37), 



CHAPTER VII 
INTERCOURSE WITH MEN 



21. ATTITUDE TOWARD HIS MOTHER. Points to his 

divine as well as human character. Seeks to give no 
ground for Mariolatry. 

22. TOWARD HIS DISCIPLES. He called them "friends," 

and bore with them patiently. Under him they be- 
came great benefactors and teachers. 

23. TOWARD CHILDREN. He received them and said 

that of such is his kingdom. He commended the 
childlike spirit to all his followers. 

24. TOWARD WOMEN. Purity combined with familiarity 

and tenderness. Friend and Brother, yet Lord and 
Saviour. 

Let us cast a glance at the intercourse of Jesus with 
various classes of men. 

21. Attitude toward His Mother. — The relation of 
Jesus to his mother is without a parallel, and points to 
his divine as well as human character. He treats her 
with the respect and tenderness of a son, and yet with 
the dignity and authority of the Messiah. He obeys her 
as man, and yet commands her to obey and to follow him 
as her Saviour and example. He was subject to his 
parents, and thus fulfilled the cardinal virtue of a child 
(Luke 2: 51) ; yet even in his twelfth year he told them 
that he owed supreme allegiance to his heavenly Father 
(Luke 2 : 48, 49). At the wedding of Cana, when Mary, 
with the best intention, ventured to interfere with his 
Messianic office, he gently rebuked her haste, saying: 

48 



INTERCOURSE WITH MEN 49 

"Woman, what have I to do with thee ? mine hour is not 
yet come." And his mother at once reverently submitted 
(John 2: 4, 5). On a later occasion when she and his 
brothers and sisters — whether they were cousins, or 
children of Joseph by a former marriage, or younger 
children of Mary, makes no difference here — pressed 
through the crowd to speak to him, he stretched forth 
his hand toward his disciples and said : "Behold my 
mother and my brethren ; for whosoever shall do the will 
of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, 
and sister, and mother" (Matt. 12: 46-50; Luke 8: 21; 
Mark 3: 34). And when a certain woman lifted up her 
voice and said to him : "Blessed is the womb that bare 
thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked," he replied : 
"Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, 
and keep it" (Luke 11: 27, 28). He manifested his 
filial affection in his dying moments on the cross when he 
committed his mother to his bosom disciple with the 
touching words: "Woman, behold thy son" (John 19: 
26). It is the cross which cements pure spiritual rela- 
tionships, and makes them stronger and dearer than ties 
of blood. But it is significant that neither here nor else- 
where does he address Mary as "mother," but simply as 
"woman," as in prophetic foresight and warning against 
Mariolatry. 

22. Toward His Disciples. — The intercourse of 
Christ with his disciples was frank and familiar, yet 
inspiring reverence and awe. They both loved and 
adored him as their Friend and Lord, and put their whole 
trust in him as their Saviour. He called them "friends." 
He washed their feet in condescending humility. He 
kept nothing from them which they could bear and which 
tended to their benefit. He bore meekly and patiently 
with their ignorance, their want of faith, their carnal 



50 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

notions of the Messiah, and their misunderstandings of 
his sublime spiritual sayings. He forgave the denial of 
Peter, and would have forgiven even the treason of 
Judas, if, instead of hanging himself in despair, he had 
in tearful repentance fled to the cross. He promised 
his disciples a glorious reward in heaven, but in this 
sinful world only poverty, hatred, persecution, and death. 
He sent them as sheep among wolves. And yet they 
felt irresistibly drawn to him, and forsook all to follow 
him. Even if he did something which offended their 
Jewish prejudices, as his open conversation with a 
woman, they did not dare to remonstrate, being con- 
vinced that their Teacher could do nothing wrong or 
improper (John 4: 27). How bitterly did Peter bewail 
his unfaithfulness against the most faithful of the faith- 
ful ! Under his guidance a dozen poor, unlearned fisher- 
men of Galilee, who without him would have been buried 
in obscurity, have become the greatest teachers and 
benefactors of mankind! Where shall we look for a 
parallel case in history? 

23. Toward Children. — Jesus was a friend of chil- 
dren. All good men are. True greatness of character 
is based on childlike simplicity. The innocence, humility, 
and trustfulness of childhood are a reminiscence of par- 
adise, and have an irresistible charm. The last favorite 
exhortation of St. John was : "Little children, love one 
another !" Gerson, the celebrated Chancellor of the Uni- 
versity of Paris, is said to have ended his busy life on 
the heights of learning and church government with the 
instruction of children. Luther wrote truly childlike 
letters to his children in the midst of the battles of the 
Reformation during the Diet of Augsburg. How many 
of the noblest men and women nowadays find delight 
in instructing and caring for children at home, in the 



INTERCOURSE WITH MEN 51 

school, in the orphan asylum! And they draw their 
inspiration for these labors of love from him who took 
children into his arms and said: "Suffer the little chil- 
dren to come unto me, and forbid them not ; for of such 
is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14), who praised 
his heavenly Father for revealing the counsel of his 
mercy unto babes (Matt. 11 : 25), and who commended 
to all his followers a childlike spirit as the necessary 
condition of entering into his kingdom (Matt. 18: 3). 

24. Toward Women. — The intercourse of Jesus with 
women was likewise truly human, and yet truly divine. 
What freedom and intimacy, as contrasted with rab- 
binical prejudices and the Oriental contempt of woman! 
What elevation above sensual passion! What purity 
combined with familiarity ! What dignity blended with 
tenderness! He who, as the Universal Man and Sa- 
viour, could enter into no relation of equality with any 
fallen daughter of Eve, and who can find a worthy bride 
only in the whole Church of the redeemed, did not 
despise the gifts of pious women, and retreated from 
time to time to that home of peace at Bethany, where 
the busy, practical Martha administered to his wants, 
and the retiring, contemplative Mary sat at his feet, 
drinking in his words of life (Luke 10 : 38). The groans 
of the woman in travail, and the joys of the mother over 
the new-born child, reached his sympathizing ear (John 
16 : 21 ). He, the purest of the pure, who condemned even 
the lustful look, as adultery of the heart (Matt. 5: 28), 
allowed a woman of ill-repute to wash and wipe his feet 
with tears of repentance in the house of a Pharisee (Luke 
7: 87, 38), and pardoned an open adulteress with the 
warning: "Go, and sin no more" (John 8:11). How 
kindly and earnestly did he speak to the Samaritan 
Magdalene at Jacob's Well, touching her conscience at 



52 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

the tenderest spot, directing her mind to the true wor- 
ship of an omnipresent God, and quenching the thirst 
of her soul with the water of life (John 4). To the 
weeping Mary Magdalene he appeared in the glory of 
his resurrection, and filled her with comfort and joy. 
He approached women as a friend and brother, and 
yet as their Lord and Saviour. Hence they were at- 
tracted to him as to no other being, with mingled feelings 
of love and reverence, and in the full conviction that he 
alone could satisfy their deepest wants and longing after 
God. They were "the last at the cross and the first at 
the open sepulcher." And ever since, in unbroken suc- 
cession, the noblest and purest of women have fled to 
him for pardon and peace, and consecrated to him their 
tenderest and strongest affection, for the good of their 
fellow men. What would woman be without Christ? 
Her condition in heathen and Mohammedan countries 
gives but one answer. 



CHAPTER VIII 
UNITY OF VIRTUE AND PIETY 



25. UNBROKEN COMMUNION WITH GOD. Piety was 

the soul of his morality. Uninterrupted union and 
communion with God. Place of prayer in his life. 
He becomes the living embodiment of Christianity. 

26. ACTIVE SERVICE TO MAN. No inactive contempla- 

tion, but practical activity. An unbroken series of 
good works. 

The first feature in the singular perfection of 
Christ's character which strikes our attention is the 
harmony of virtue and piety, of morality and religion, 
or of love to God and love to man. He is more than 
moral, and more than pious ; he is holy in the strict and 
full sense of the word. There is a divine beauty in his 
character, the mere contemplation of which brings 
purity, peace, and bliss to the soul. 

25. Unbroken Communion with God. — Piety was 
the soul of his morality, and lifted it far above the 
sphere of legality or conformity to law. Every moral 
action in him proceeded from supreme love to God, and 
looked to the temporal and eternal welfare of man. The 
groundwork of his character was the most intimate and 
uninterrupted union and communion with his heavenly 
Father, from whom he derived, to whom he referred, 
everything. Already in his twelfth year he found his 
life-element and delight in the things of his Father 
(Luke 2: 49). It was his daily food to do the will of 

53 



54 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

him that sent him, and to finish his work (John 4: 34; 
comp. 5 : 30). To him he looked in prayer before every 
important act, and taught his disciples that model 
prayer, which, for simplicity, brevity, comprehensive- 
ness, and suitableness, can never be surpassed. He 
often retired to a mountain or solitary place for prayer, 
and spent days and nights in sacred meditation. But 
so constant and uniform was his habit of communion with 
the great Jehovah that he kept it up amid the multi- 
tude, and converted the crowded city into a religious 
retreat. His self-consciousness was at every moment 
conditioned, animated, and impregnated by the con- 
sciousness of God. Even when he exclaimed in indescrib- 
able anguish of body and soul, and in vicarious sym- 
pathy with the misery of the whole race: "My God, 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me? " (Matt. 27: 46) 
the bond of union was not broken, or even loosened; it 
was only obscured, as the sun by a passing cloud; and 
the enjoyment, not the possession, of it was for a mo- 
ment withdrawn from his feelings ; for immediately af- 
terward he triumphantly exclaimed : "It is finished !" and 
commended his soul into the hands of his Father. So 
strong and complete was this holy union of Christ with 
God at every moment of his life, that he fully realized 
the idea of religion, whose object is to bring about such 
a union, and that he is the personal representative and 
living embodiment of Christianity, as the true and per- 
fect religion. 

26. Active Service to Man.— With all this, the piety 
of Christ was no inactive contemplation, or retiring 
mysticism and selfish enjoyment, but thoroughly prac- 
tical, ever active in works of charity, and tending tp 
regenerate and transform the world into the kingdom 
of God. He "went about doing good." His life was an 



UNITY OF VIRTUE AND PIETY 55 

unbroken series of good works and virtues in active 
exercise; all proceeding from the same union with God, 
animated by the same love, and tending to the same 
end, — the glory of God and the happiness of mankind. 



CHAPTER IX 

COMPLETENESS AND UNIVERSALITY 
OF CHRIST'S CHARACTER 



27. GREAT HUMAN CHARACTERS. Rare men of com- 

manding genius. They concentrate the power of 
whole generations. 

28. THEIR SECTIONAL ASPECT. They represent sec- 

tional humanity. Extraordinary but fallible men. 

29. CHRIST ALONE IS UNIVERSAL. The universal type 

for universal imitation. He arose above all prejudices 
and bigotries. 

The next feature we would notice is the complete- 
ness or pleromatic fulness of the moral and religious 
character of Christ. While all other men represent, 
at best, but broken fragments of the idea of goodness 
and holiness, he exhausts the list of virtues and graces. 
His soul is a moral paradise of charming flowers, that 
shine in every variety of color under the blue dome of 
the skies, drink in the refreshing dews of heaven and 
the warming beams of the sun, send their sweet fragrance 
around, and fill the beholder with rapturous delight. 

27. Great Human Characters.— History exhibits to 
us rare men of commanding and comprehensive genius, 
who stand at the head of their age and nation, and 
furnish material for the intellectual activity of whole 
generations and periods, until they are succeeded by 
other heroes at a new epoch of development. As rivers 
generally spring from high mountains, so knowledge and 

56 



UNIVERSALITY OF CHARACTER 57 

moral power rise and are ever nourished from the 
heights of humanity. 

Abraham, the father of the faithful ; Moses, the law- 
giver of the Jewish theocracy; Elijah among the 
prophets; Peter, Paul, and John among the apostles; 
Athanasius and Chrysostom among the Greek, Augus- 
tine and Jerome among the Latin, fathers ; Anselm and 
Thomas Aquinas among the schoolmen ; Leo I and Greg- 
ory VII among the popes ; Luther and Calvin in the 
line of Protestant reformers and divines ; Socrates, the 
patriarch of the ancient schools of philosophy ; Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe and Schiller, 
in the history of poetry among the various nations to 
which they belong; Raphael among painters; Charle- 
magne, the first and greatest in the long succession of 
German emperors ; Napoleon, towering high above all 
the generals of his training; Washington, the wisest 
and best, as well as the first, of American Presidents, and 
the purest and noblest type of the American character, 
— may be mentioned as examples of those representative 
heroes in history who anticipate and concentrate the 
powers of whole generations. 

28. Their Sectional Aspect. — But all these charac- 
ters represent only sectional, never universal, humanity : 
they are identified with a particular people or age, and 
partake of their errors, superstitions, and failings, al- 
most in the same proportion in which they exhibit their 
virtues. Moses, though revered by the followers of three 
religions, was a Jew in views, feelings, habits, and posi- 
tion, as well as by parentage ; Socrates never rose above 
the Greek type of character; Luther was a German in 
all his virtues and faults, in his strength and weakness, 
and can only be properly understood as a German; 
Calvin, though an exile from his native land, remained a 



58 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

Frenchman; and Washington can be to no nation on 
earth what he is to Americans. The influence of these 
great men may and does extend far beyond their na- 
tional horizons ; yet they can never furnish a universal 
model for imitation. We regard them as extraordinary 
but fallible and imperfect men, whom it would be very 
unsafe to follow in every line of conduct. Very fre- 
quently the failings and vices of great men are in pro- 
portion to their virtues and powers, as the tallest bodies 
cast the longest shadows. Even the Apostles are models 
of piety and virtue only as far as they reflect the image 
of their heavenly Master; and it is with this express 
limitation that Paul exhorts his spiritual children : "Be 
ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ" (1 Cor. 
11: 1). 

29. Christ Alone Universal. — What these represen- 
tative men were to particular ages or nations or sects, 
or particular schools of science and art, Christ was to 
the human family at large in its relation to God. He, 
and he alone, is the universal type for universal imi- 
tation. Hence he could, without the least impropriety 
or suspicion of vanity, call upon all men to forsake all 
things and to follow him. 19 He stands above the limita- 
tions of age, school, sect, nation, and race. He was 
indeed an Israelite as to the flesh; walked about in the 
dress of a Jewish rabbi, and not of a Greek philosopher ; 
and conformed, no doubt, to the Jewish habits of daily 
life. But this was his merest outside. If we look at his 
inner man, his thoughts and actions, they are of uni- 
versal significance. There is nothing Jewish about him 
that is in the least repulsive or exclusive. The particu- 
lar and national in him is always subordinated to the 

w Matt. 4:19; 8:22; 9:9; Mark 2:14; 8:34; 10:21; Luke 5: 
27; 9:23, 59; 18:22; John 1:43; 10:27; 12:26. 



UNIVERSALITY OF CHARACTER 59 

general and human. He was never identified with a 
party or sect. He was equally removed from the stiff 
formalism of the Pharisees, the loose liberalism of the 
Sadducees, and the inactive mysticism of the Essenes. 
He rose above all the prejudices, bigotries, and super- 
stitions of his age and people, which exert their power 
even upon the strongest and otherwise most liberal minds. 

Witness his freedom in the observance of the Sabbath, 
by which he offended the scrupulous literalists, while 
he fulfilled, as the Lord of the Sabbath, the true spirit 
of the law in its universal and abiding significance; 20 
his reply to his disciples, when they traced the misfor- 
tune of the blind man to a particular sin of the man 
or of his parents (John 9:3); his liberal conduct toward 
the Samaritans, as contrasted with the inveterate hatred 
and prejudice of the Jews, including his own disciples, 
at the time; 21 and his charitable judgment of the 
slaughtered Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled 
with their sacrifices, and the eighteen upon whom the 
tower in Siloam fell (Luke 13: 1-4). "Think ye," he 
addressed the children of superstition, "that these . . . 
were sinners above all the Galileans, . . . and above all 
the men that dwelt in Jerusalem, because they suffered 
such things ? I tell you, Nay ; but, except ye repent, ye 
shall all likewise perish." 

The only instance of Christ's complicity with popu- 
lar error and superstition which rationalists can point 
to with some degree of plausibility, is his belief in the 
devil and in demons. But they may say what they 
please against such a belief as irrational; experience 
everywhere disproves their arguments : while they get rid 

"Matt 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-9; John 5:16-18. 
21 See the dialogue with the woman of Samaria, John 4:5ff.; 
and the parable of the merciful Samaritan, Luke 10:30-37. 



60 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

of one devil, they cannot deny the many devils in human 
shape, and leave them even more inexplicable; for it is 
much more irrational to believe in the continued existence 
of a chaotic wilderness of bad men and principles, than 
in an organized empire of evil with a controlling head. 

As the pyramids rise high above the sandy plains of 
Egypt, so Christ towers above all human teachers and 
founders of sects and religions. He is, in the language 
of a modern infidel, "a man of colossal dimensions." 
He found disciples and worshipers among the Jews, al- 
though he identified himself with none of their sects and 
traditions; among the Greeks, although he proclaimed 
no new system of philosophy; among the Romans, al- 
though he fought no battle, and founded no worldly 
empire; among the Hindus, who despise all men of low 
caste; among the black savages of Africa and the red 
men of America, as well as the most highly civilized 
nations of modern times in all quarters of the globe. 
All his words and all his actions, while they were fully 
adapted to the occasions which called them forth, retain 
their force and applicability undiminished in all ages 
and nations. He is the same unsurpassed and unsur- 
passable model of every virtue to Christians of every 
generation, every clime, every sect, every nation, and 
every race. 



CHAPTER X 

HARMONY OF ALL GRACES AND 
VIRTUES IN CHRIST 



30. HE WAS FREE FROM ONE-SIDEDNESS. Not a man 

of one idea. Cannot attribute to him any one temper- 
ament. His virtue healthy, manly, vigorous, yet ge- 
nial, social, winning. 

31. BALANCE OF HIS QUALITIES. Zeal never degener- 

ated into passion. Childlike innocence combined with 
manly strength. Fearless courage and wise caution. 
The most radical yet the most conservative of reform- 
ers. 

It must not be supposed that a complete catalogue 
of virtues would do justice to the character of Jesus. 
It is not only the completeness, but still more the even 
proportion and perfect harmony of virtues and graces, 
apparently opposite and contradictory, which dis- 
tinguishes him specifically from all other men. This 
feature gives the finish to that beauty of holiness which 
is the sublimest picture that can be presented to our 
contemplation. It has struck with singular force the 
best writers on the subject. 

30. Free from One-sidedness. — Christ was free from 
all one-sidedness, which constitutes the weakness as well 
as the strength of great men. He was not a man of 
one idea, nor of one virtue towering above all the rest. 
The moral forces were so well tempered and moderated 
by each other, that none was unduly prominent, none 

61 



62 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

carried to excess, none alloyed by the kindred failing. 
Each was checked and completed by the opposite grace. 
His character never lost its even balance and happy 
equilibrium, never needed modification or readjustment. 
It was thoroughly sound and uniformly consistent from 
the beginning to the end. 

We cannot properly attribute to him any one tem- 
perament. He was neither sanguine, like Peter; nor 
choleric, like Paul; nor melancholic, like John. He 
combined the vivacity of the sanguine temperament 
without its levity, the vigor of the choleric without its 
violence, the seriousness of the melancholic without its 
austerity, the calmness of the phlegmatic without its 
apathy. 

He was equally far removed from the excesses of 
the legalist, the pietist, the ascetic, and the enthusiast. 
With the strictest obedience to the law, he moved in the 
element of freedom ; with all the fervor of the enthusiast, 
he was always calm, sober, and self-possessed. Not- 
withstanding his complete and uniform elevation above 
the affairs of this world, he freely mingled with society, 
male and female, dined with publicans and sinners, 
played with little children and blessed them, honored the 
wedding-feast with his cheering presence and first mir- 
acle, shed tears at the sepulcher of a friend, delighted 
in God's nature, admired the beauties of the lilies of 
the field, and ennobled the occupations of the husband- 
man for the illustration of the sublime truths of the king- 
dom of heaven. His virtue was healthy, manly, vigorous, 
yet genial, social, and winning; never austere and re- 
pulsive; always in full sympathy with innocent joy and 
pleasure. He, the purest and holiest of men, provided 
wine for the wedding-f east ; introduced the fatted calf 
and music and dancing into the picture of welcome of 



HARMONY OF GRACES AND VIRTUES 63 

the prodigal son to his father's house ; and even provoked 
the sneer of his adversaries that he "came eating and 
drinking," and was a "glutton" and a "wine-bibber." 

31. Balance of His Qualities. — His zeal never degen- 
erated into passion, nor his constancy into obstinacy, 
nor his benevolence into weakness, nor his tenderness into 
sentimentality. His unworldliness was free from indif- 
ference and unsociability, his dignity ' from pride and 
presumption, his affability from undue familiarity, his 
self-denial from moroseness, his temperance from aus- 
terity. He combined childlike innocence with manly 
strength, absorbing devotion to God with untiring in- 
terest in the welfare of man, tender love to the sinner 
with uncompromising severity against sin, commanding 
dignity with winning humility, fearless courage with 
wise caution, unyielding firmness with sweet gentleness. 

He is justly compared with the lion in strength and 
with the lamb in meekness. He equally possessed the 
wisdom of the serpent and the simplicity of the dove. 
He brought both the sword against every form of wick- 
edness, and the peace of the soul which the world cannot 
give. He was the most effective, and yet the least noisy, 
the most radical, and yet the most conservative, calm, 
and patient, of all reformers. He came to fulfil every 
letter of the law ; and yet he made all things new. The 
same hand which drove the profane traffickers from the 
Temple, blessed little children, healed the lepers, and 
rescued the sinking disciple; the same ear which heard 
the voice of approbation from heaven, was open to the 
cries of the woman in travail; the same mouth which 
pronounced the terrible woe on hypocrites, and con- 
demned the impure desire and unkind feeling as well as 
the open crime, blessed the poor in spirit, announced 
pardon to the adulteress, and prayed for his murderers ; 



"\ 



64 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

the same eye which beheld the mysteries of God, and 
penetrated the heart of man, shed tears of compassion 
over ungrateful Jerusalem, and tears of friendship at the 
grave of Lazarus. 

These are indeed opposite traits of character, yet 
as little contradictory as the different manifestations of 
God's power and goodness in the tempest and the sun- 
shine, in the towering Alps and the lily of the valley, 
in the boundless ocean and the dewdrop of the morning. 
They are separated in imperfect men, but united in 
Christ, the universal model for all. 



CHAPTER XI 
PASSION AND CRUCIFIXION 



32. CHRIST COMPLETE IN SUFFERING. The highest 

standard of true martyrdom. Resembles Plato's pic- 
ture of a righteous man. 

33. FORGIVENESS AND SUBMISSION EXALTED. Love 

of one's enemies. A sublime maxim exhibited in life. 

34. MINISTRY FILLED WITH TRIAL. Christ's path ob- 

structed with difficulties. 

35. SYMPATHETIC PAIN. 

36. SIN-BEARING PASSION. Presents a tragedy of uni- 

versal significance. The death on the cross. 

37. DIVINE GLORY OF SPIRIT. Shows a commanding 

grandeur and majesty. "Washed out with his blood 
the guilt of a fallen world. 

As all active virtues meet in Jesus, so he unites 
the active or heroic virtues with the passive and gentle. 
He is the highest standard of all true martyrdom. 

32. Complete in Suffering. — No character can be- 
come complete without trial and suffering; and a noble 
death is the crowning act of a noble life. Edmund 
Burke said to Fox, in the English Parliament: 
"Obloquy is a necessary ingredient of all true glory. 
Calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph." 
The ancient Greeks and Romans admired a good man 
struggling with misfortune, as a sight worthy of the 
gods. Plato describes the righteous man as one who, 
without doing any injustice, yet has the appearance 
of the greatest injustice, and proves his own justice by 

65 



66 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

perseverance against all calumny unto death; yea, he 
predicts, that, if such a righteous man should ever ap- 
pear on earth, he would be scourged, tortured, bound, 
deprived of his sight, and, after having suffered all possi- 
ble injury, be nailed to a post. No wonder that ancient 
fathers and modern divines saw in this remarkable pas- 
sage a striking parallel to the description of the serv- 
ant of Jehovah in Isaiah, ch. 53, and an unconscious 
prophecy of the suffering Christ. 

But how far is this abstract ideal of the great 
philosopher from the actual reality as it appeared three 
hundred years afterward ! The great men of this world, 
who rise even above themselves on inspiring occasions, 
and boldly face a superior army, are often thrown off 
their equilibrium in ordinary life, and grow impatient at 
trifling obstacles. Only think of Napoleon at the head 
of his conquering legions and at the helm of an empire, 
and the same Napoleon after the defeat at Waterloo 
and on the island of St. Helena. The highest form of 
passive virtue attained by ancient heathenism or mod- 
ern secular heroism is that stoicism which meets and over- 
comes the trials and misfortunes of life in the spirit of 
haughty contempt and unfeeling indifference, that be- 
comes a destruction of the finer sensibilities and another 
exhibition of selfishness and pride. 

33. Forgiveness and Submission Exalted. — Christ 
has set up a far higher standard by his teaching and 
example, never known before or since, except in imperfect 
imitation of him. He has revolutionized moral philos- 
ophy, and convinced the world that forgiving love, holi- 
ness and humility, gentle patience in suffering, and 
cheerful submission to the holy will of God, are the 
crowning excellency of moral greatness. "If thy 
brother," he says, "trespass against thee seven times in a 



PASSION AND CRUCIFIXION 67 

day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, say- 
ing, I repent; thou shalt forgive him" (Luke 17: 4). 
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good 
to them that hate you, and pray for them that despite- 
fully use you and persecute you" (Matt. 5: 44). This 
is a sublime maxim truly; but still more sublime is its 
actual exhibition in his life. 

34. Ministry Filled with Trial. — Christ's passive 
virtue is not confined to the closing scenes of his min- 
istry. As human life is beset at every step with trials, 
vexations, and hindrances, which should serve the edu- 
cational purpose of developing its resources and proving 
its strength, so was Christ's. During the whole state 
of his humiliation, he was "a man of sorrows, and ac- 
quainted with grief" (Isa. 53: 3), and had to endure 
the "contradiction of sinners" (Heb. 12: 3). He was 
poor, and suffered hunger and fatigue; he was tempted 
by the devil; his path was obstructed with apparently 
insurmountable difficulties from the outset ; his words 
and miracles called forth the bitter hatred of the world, 
which resulted at last in the bloody council of death. 
The Pharisees and Sadducees forgot their jealousies and 
quarrels in opposing him. They rejected and per- 
verted his testimony; they laid snares for him by in- 
sidious questions ; they called him a glutton and a wine- 
bibber for eating and drinking like other men, a friend 
of publicans and sinners for his condescending love and 
mercy, a Sabbath-breaker for doing good on the Sab- 
bath day ; they charged him with madness and blasphemy 
for asserting his unity with the Father, and derived his 
miracles from Beelzebub, the prince of devils. The 
common people, though astonished at his wisdom and 
mighty works, pointed sneeringly at his origin ; his own 
country and native town refused him the honor of a 



68 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

prophet: his own brothers, we are told, did not believe 
in him ; and, in their impatient zeal for a temporal king- 
dom, they found fault with his unostentatious mode of 
proceeding (John 7: 3-10). Even his apostles and dis- 
ciples, notwithstanding their profound reverence for his 
character, and faith in his divine origin and mission as 
the Messiah of God, by their ignorance, their carnal 
Jewish notions, and their almost habitual misunder- 
standing of his spiritual discourses, must have consti- 
tuted a severe trial of patience to a teacher of far less 
superiority to his pupils. 

35. Sympathetic Pain. — To all this must be added 
the constant sufferings from sympathy with human 
misery as it met him in various forms at every step. 
What a trial for him, the purest, gentlest, most tender- 
hearted of men, to breathe more than thirty years the 
foul atmosphere of this fallen world; to see the con- 
stant outbursts of sinful passions ; to hear the great wail 
of humanity borne to his ears on the four winds of 
heaven; to be brought into personal contact with the 
blind, the lame, the deaf, the paralytic, the lunatic, the 
possessed, the dead; and to be assaulted, as it were, by 
the concentrated force of sickness, sorrow, grief, and 
agony ! 

36. Sin-bearing Passion. — But how shall we describe 
his passion, more properly so called, with which no 
other suffering can be compared for a moment? There 
is a lonely grandeur in it, foreshadowed in the words of 
the prophet : "I have trodden the wine-press alone, and 
of the people there was none with me" (Isa. 63: 3). 
If great men occupy a solitary position, far above the 
ordinary level, on the sublime heights of thought or 
action, how much more, then, Jesus in his sufferings, — 
he, the purest and holiest of beings ! The nearer a man 



PASSION AND CRUCIFIXION 69 

approaches to moral perfection, the deeper are his sensi- 
bilities, the keener his sense of sin and evil and sorrow 
in this wicked world. 

Never did any man suffer more innocently, more un- 
justly, more intensely, than Jesus of Nazareth. The 
history of his passion presents, within the narrow limits 
of a few hours, a tragedy of universal significance, with 
every form of human weakness and infernal wickedness ; 
of ingratitude, desertion, injury, and insult; of bodily 
and mental pain and anguish; culminating in the most 
ignominious death then known among Jews and Gentiles, 
— the death of a malefactor and a slave. The govern- 
ment and the people combined against him who had 
come to save them. His own disciples forsook him; 
Peter denied him; Judas, under the inspiration of the 
devil, betrayed him ; the rulers of the nation condemned 
him; rude soldiers mocked him; the furious mob cried, 
"Crucify him ! " He was seized in the night, hurried 
from tribunal to tribunal, arrayed in a crown of thorns, 
insulted, smitten, scourged, spit upon, compelled to 
carry his own cross, and nailed to the accursed tree 
between two robbers and murderers ! 

37. Divine Glory of Spirit. — How did Christ bear 
all these little and great trials of life, and the death on 
the cross? 

Let us remember first, that, unlike the icy Stoics 
in their unnatural and repulsive pseudo-virtue, he had 
the keenest sensibilities and the deepest sympathies with 
all human grief, that made him shed tears at the grave 
of a friend and in the agony of the garden, and provide 
a refuge for his mother in the last dying hour. But 
with this touching tenderness and delicacy of feeling 
he ever combined a serene dignity, a sublime self- 
control, an imperturbable calmness of mind. There 



70 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

is a commanding grandeur and majesty in his deepest 
sufferings which forbids a feeling of pity and compas- 
sion as incompatible with the deference for his charac- 
ter. We feel the force of his words to the women of 
Jerusalem, when they bewailed him on the way to Cal- 
vary : "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and 
your children." 

He clearly foresaw, and repeatedly foretold, his 
passion to his disciples. 

But he never murmured, — never uttered discontent, 
displeasure, or resentment. He was never disheartened, 
ruffled, or fretted, but full of confidence that all was 
well ordered in the providence of his heavenly Father. 
His calmness in the tempest on the lake, when his disci- 
ples were trembling on the brink of destruction and 
despair, is an illustration of his heavenly frame of mind. 
All his works were performed with a quiet dignity and 
ease that contrast strikingly with the surrounding com- 
motion and excitement. He never asked the favor, or 
heard the applause, or feared the threat, of the world. 
He moved serenely, like the sun, above the clouds of 
human passions and trials and commotions as they sailed 
under him. He was ever surrounded with the element 
of peace, even in his parting hour in that dark and 
solemn night, when he said to his disturbed disciples: 
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; 
not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14: 
27). He. was never what we call unhappy, but full of 
inward joy, which he bequeathed to his disciples in 
that sublimest of all prayers, "that they might have my 
joy fulfilled in themselves" (John 17: 13; comp. 16: 
33). With all his severe rebuke to the Pharisees, he 
never indulged in personalities, He ever returned good 



PASSION AND CRUCIFIXION 71 

for evil. He forgave Peter for his denial; and would 
have forgiven Judas, if, in the exercise of sincere re- 
pentance, he had sought his pardon. Even while hang- 
ing on the cross, he had only the language of pity for 
the wretches who were driving the nails into his hands 
and feet; and prayed in their behalf: "Father, for- 
give them; for they know not what they do." He did 
not seek or hasten his martyrdom, like many of the early 
martyrs of the Ignatian type, in their morbid enthu- 
siasm and ambitious humility, but quietly and patiently 
waited for the hour appointed by the will of his heavenly 
Father. 

But, when the hour came, with what self-possession 
and calmness, with what strength and meekness, with 
what majesty and gentleness, did he pass through its 
dark and trying scenes ! A prisoner before Pilate, who 
represented the power of the Roman Empire, he pro- 
fesses himself a king of truth, and makes the governor 
tremble before him (John 18: 37; Matt. 27: 19, 24). 
Charged with crime at the tribunal of the high-priest, 
he speaks to him with the majesty and dignity of the 
Judge of the world (Matt. 26: 64) ; and in the agony 
of death on the cross he dispenses a place in paradise 
to the penitent robber (Luke 23: 43). In the history 
of the passion, every word and act is significant: from 
the agony in Gethsemane, when overwhelmed with the 
sympathetic sense of the guilt of mankind, and in full 
view of the terrible scenes before him, — the only guilt- 
less being in the world, — he prayed that the cup might 
pass from him, but immediately added: "Not my will, 
but thine be done," to the triumphant exclamation on the 
cross : "It is finished ! " Even his dignified silence be- 
fore the tribunal of his enemies and the furious mob, 
when, "as a lamb dumb before her shearers, he opened 



72 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

not his mouth," is more eloquent than any apology. 
Who will venture to bring a parallel from the annals of 
ancient or modern sages? Even a Rousseau confessed: 
"If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, 
the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." 22 

The nearer we approach to them, the more we feel 
that the sufferings of Christ are unlike any other suf- 
fering; that he died the just for the unjust, the Holy 
One for sinners ; and washed out with his blood the guilt 
of a fallen world. We bow down and adore the atoning 
sacrifice of boundless love. The mere idea of a divine- 
human Redeemer of the race from the thraldom of sin 
and death is surpassingly sublime and irresistibly at- 
tractive : how much more the actual reality ! It is, 
indeed, a mystery which we cannot fully grasp ; but a 
mystery so palpably divine and heavenly in its origin 
and character, so blessed in its effects, that head and 
heart are constrained to bow in adoration and praise, 
and are filled with gratitude and joy. The passion and 
crucifixion of Jesus, like his whole character, stand with- 
out a parallel, solitary and alone in their glory, and will 
ever continue to be what they have been for these nine- 
teen hundred years to the noblest and best of men, — 
the sacred theme of meditation, the exemplar of suf- 
fering virtue, the weapon against sin and Satan, the 
stimulus to gratitude and holiness, the source of com- 
fort and peace. 

22 See Appendix, pp. 134, 135. 



CHAPTER XII 

CHRIST'S CHARACTER THE GREAT- 
EST MORAL MIRACLE OF 
HISTORY 



38. NO ADEQUATE UNINSPIRED PORTRAYAL. Her- 

der and Pressense deprecated the attempt. The per- 
fection of art falls short of the historical fact. 

39. TRIBUTES OF GREAT MINDS. Conviction of the 

strongest intellects. Significance of Christianity 
hangs on his person. 

40. CONCLUSIVE PROOF OF DIVINITY. The super- 

natural in Christ an inherent power. He was the true 
Shekinah. 

38. No Adequate Uninspired Portrayal. — Such was 
the Jesus of Nazareth, — a true man in body, soul, and 
spirit, yet differing from all men; a character unique 
and original from tender childhood to ripe manhood, 
moving in unbroken union with God, overflowing with 
love to man, free from every sin and error, innocent and 
holy, devoted to the noblest ends, teaching and practis- 
ing all virtues in perfect harmony, sealing the purest 
life with the sublimest death, and ever acknowledged 
since as the one and only perfect model of goodness and 
holiness. All human greatness loses on closer inspec- 
tion; but Christ's character grows more pure, sacred, 
and lovely, the better we know him. The whole range 
of history and fiction furnishes no parallel to it. There 
never was any approach to it, before or since, except in 

73 



74 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

faint imitation of his example. When the gifted Herder 
was requested by Lavater to write the life of Jesus, he 
replied: "I to write the life of Jesus? Never! The 
Evangelists have done it as alone it can and ought to be 
written" Whoever attempts, in the proper spirit, 
this most difficult task of history, will lay down his pen 
discouraged, and subscribe to the concluding confes- 
sion of Pressense: "Gladly, thou divine Son of Mary, 
had I said something great of thee. At times I thought 
I saw, in the flashing light of a blessed hour, thy divine 
majesty adorned in spotless purity; but as I was about 
to fix the holy vision, the pencil trembled in my un- 
skilled hand, and I could give only a pale outline. Who 
are we that attempt to describe thy holiness ! " 

No biographer, moralist, or artist can here do jus- 
tice to the reality. The actual character of Jesus is 
felt to be far greater than any conception and represen- 
tation of it by the mind, the tongue, or the pencil of 
man. We might as well attempt to empty the waters 
of the boundless sea into a bucket, or to portray the 
splendor of the risen sun and the starry heavens with 
ink. No picture of the Saviour, though drawn by the 
master hand of a Raphael or Diirer or Rubens ; no epic, 
though conceived by the genius of a Dante or Milton, — 
can improve on the artless narrative of the Gospels, 
whose only but all-powerful charm is truth. In this case, 
certainly, truth is stranger than fiction, and speaks best 
for itself without comment, explanation, or eulogy. 
Here, and here alone, the perfection of art falls short 
of the historical fact, and fancy finds no room for 
idealizing the real; for here we have the absolute ideal 
itself in living reality. It seems to me that this con- 
sideration alone should satisfy a reflecting mind that 
Christ's character^ though truly natural and human^ 



CHRIST'S CHARACTER 75 

rises far above the proportions of humanity, even in its 
purest and greatest representatives. 

39. Tributes of Great Minds. — This conviction has 
forced itself upon many of the strongest intellects, 
among skeptics and men of the world, in proportion as 
they allowed themselves to yield to the light of truth 
and the power of facts. Jean Jacques Rousseau, one 
of the leaders of French infidelity in the eighteenth 
century, admitted that there could be no comparison 
between Socrates and Christ; as little as between a sage 
and a God. Napoleon, though a stranger to Christian 
experience, saw with his keen eagle-eye that Christ was 
more than man; and that, once admitting his divinity, 
the Christian sj-stem becomes as clear and precise as a 
problem of algebra. His remarkable utterances on this 
subject at St. Helena may have been somewhat modified 
and expanded, but bear the unmistakable evidence of 
the Napoleonic grasp and style. Goethe, the most uni- 
versal, but at the same time the most worldly, of modern 
poets, calls Christ "the Divine Man," "the Holy One," 
and represents him as the pattern and model of hu- 
manity. Jean Paul Frederick Richter, another great 
German poet, represents Jesus of Nazareth as "the pur- 
est among the mighty, the mightiest among the pure, 
who with his pierced hand has raised empires from their 
foundations, turned the stream of history from its old 
channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages." 
Thomas Carlyle, the British hero-worshiper, finds none 
equal to Jesus in all the range of ancient and modern 
heroism. He called his life a "perfect ideal poem," and 
him "the greatest of all heroes," whom he does not name, 
leaving "sacred silence to meditate that sacred matter." 
Ernest Renan, the famous Orientalist and critic, who 
expels all miracles from the gospel-history, feels yet 



76 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

constrained to call Jesus "a man of colossal dimensions ; M 
"the incomparable man, to whom the universal conscience 
has decreed the title of Son of God, and that with 
justice, since he caused religion to take a step in advance 
incomparably greater than any other in the past, and 
probably than any yet to come; 99 and he closes his Life 
of Jesus with the remarkable concession: "Whatever 
may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be 
surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceas- 
ing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his 
sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will 
proclaim, that, among the sons of men, there is none 
born greater than Jesus." 23 Dr. Baur, the master of 
the Tubingen school and the ablest of skeptical critics, 
after the earnest investigations of a long and intensely 
studious life, came to the conclusion at last that the 
person of Christ remains a great mystery in history; 
and that, at all events, the whole world-historical signifi- 
cance of Christianity hangs on his person. 

40. Conclusive Proof of Divinity. — Yes, Christ's 
person is, indeed, a great but blessed mystery. It can- 
not be explained on purely humanitarian principles, nor 
derived from any intellectual and moral forces of the 
age in which he lived. On the contrary, it stands in 
marked contrast to the whole surrounding world of 
Judaism and Heathenism, which presents to us the 
dreary picture of internal decay, and which actually 
crumbled into ruin before the new moral creation of the 
crucified Jesus of Nazareth. He is the one absolute 
exception to the universal experience of mankind. He 
is the central miracle of the whole gospel-history. All 
his miracles are but the natural manifestations of his 
person, and hence they were performed with the same 
"Bee Appendix, p. 14>6, 



CHRIST'S CHARACTER 77 

ease with which we perform our ordinary daily works. 
In the Gospel of St. John, they are simply and justly 
called his "works. " It would be the greatest miracle 
indeed, if he, who is a miracle himself, should have 
performed no miracles. 

Here is just the logical inconsistency of those un- 
believers who admit the extraordinary character of 
Christ's person, and yet deny his extraordinary works. 
They admit a cause without a corresponding effect, and 
involve the person in conflict with his works, or the works 
with the person. You may as well expect the sun to 
send forth darkness as to expect ordinary works from 
such an extraordinary being. The person of Christ 
accounts for all the wonderful phenomena in his history, 
as a sufficient cause for the effect. Such a power as 
he possessed over the soul, and still exercises from day to 
day throughout Christendom, — why should it not ex- 
tend also over the lesser sphere of the body ? What was 
it for him, who is spiritually the Resurrection and the 
Life of the race, to call forth a corpse from the grave? 
Could such a heavenly life and heavenly death as his 
end in any other way than in absolute triumph over 
death, and in ascension to heaven, its proper origin and 
home? 

The supernatural and miraculous element in Christ, 
let it be borne in mind, was not a borrowed gift or an 
occasional manifestation, as we find it among the 
prophets and apostles, but an inherent power in constant 
silent or public exercise. An inward virtue dwelt in his 
person, and went forth from him, so that even the fringe 
of his garment was healing to the touch through the 
medium of faith, which is the bond of union between 
him and the soul. He was the true Shekinah, and shone 
in all his glory, not before the multitude or the unbe- 



78 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

lieving Pharisees and scribes, but when he was alone 
with his Father, or when he walked in the dark night 
over the waves of the sea, calming the storm of nature 
and strengthening the faith of his timid disciples, or 
when he stood, before his favorite three, between Moses 
and Elijah, on the mount of transfiguration. 

Thus from every direction we arrive at the conclu- 
sion that Christ, though truly natural and human, was 
at the same time truly supernatural and divine. The 
wonderful character of his person forces upon us the 
admission of the indwelling of the Divinity in him, as 
the only rational and satisfactory explanation of this 
mysterious fact. And this is the explanation which he 
gives himself. 



CHAPTER XIII 

CHRIST'S OWN TESTIMONY CON- 
CERNING HIMSELF 



41. SON OF MAN. Man in the highest sense. His man- 

hood becomes the portal of his Godhood. 

42. SON OF GOD. His absolute and eternal Sonship. Far 

above the level of human sonship to God. 

43. CENTRAL PLACE OF CHRIST'S PERSON. 

44. LAWGIVER OF NEW DISPENSATION. The last 

commission. Founder of a spiritual kingdom. 

45. CONSCIOUS PRE-EXISTENCE. " Before Abraham was 

born, I am. " 

46. SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST'S CLAIMS. He sets 

them forth as self-evident truths. 

There is but one rational explanation of this sub- 
lime mystery ; and this is found in Christ's own testimony 
concerning his superhuman and divine origin and char- 
acter. 

This testimony challenges at once our highest regard 
and belief from the absolute veracity which no one ever 
denied him, or could deny, without destroying at once 
the very foundation of his moral purity and greatness. 

41. Son of Man. — Christ strongly asserts his hu- 
manity, and calls himself, about eighty times in the 
Gospels, the Son of man. This expression, while it 
places him in one view on common ground with us as 
flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, already indicates 
at the same time that he is more than an ordinary in- 

79 



80 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

dividual, — not merely a son of man like all other 
descendants of Adam, but the Son of man ; the Man in 
the highest sense; the ideal, the universal, the absolute 
Man; the second Adam, descended from heaven; the 
Head of a new and superior order of the race, the King 
of Israel, and the Messiah for Jews and Gentiles. It is 
more comprehensive than the term, "the Son of David," 
which is likewise given to Christ as the promised Mes- 
siah, with special reference to the Jews. 24 

The appellation the Son of man does not express, 
then, as many suppose, the humiliation and condescen- 
sion of Christ simply, but his elevation rather above the 
ordinary level, and the actualization, in him and through 
him, of the ideal standard of human nature under its 
moral and religious aspect, or in its relation to God. 
He is the center of the unity of mankind, — the "reca- 
pitulation" of humanity, to use a term of Irenaeus. He is 
the true seed of the woman, the second Adam, who was 
to restore what the first Adam lost. He fulfils and closes 
the preceding, and opens and controls the succeeding, 
history of our race. All men, even the best and the 
greatest, have their weaknesses and defects, and reflect 
only a fragment of the idea of humanity. Once in his- 
tory, and once only, there was born a man who repre- 
sented humanity in its purity without the satanic adul- 
teration of sin, and in its universality without the 
limitations of nationality and age. Christ felt more 
humanly, spake more humanly, acted, suffered, and died 
more humanly, than any man before or since his coming. 
Every word and act of his appeals to universal human 
sympathies, and calls out the moral affections of all 
without distinction of race, condition, and culture. He 
is the archetypal or model Man, the King of men. He 
24 Matt. 9:27; 15:22; 12:23; 21:9; 22:41 ff., etc. 



CHRIST'S OWN TESTIMONY 81 

draws "all men" to him. He could not have been so 
perfect a man without being also divine. 

This interpretation of the title "the Son of man" 
is supported grammatically by the use of the definite 
article, and historically by the origin of the term (ac- 
cording to the usual acceptation) in Dan. 7: 13, 14, 
where it signifies the Messiah as the head of a universal 
and eternal kingdom. In the eighth Psalm, which is 
regarded as Messianic, man is represented in his ideal 
destination with reference to the Messiah as the true 
head of humanity (comp. Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21, 
22; Heb. 1:2-8). In the Syriac, the Saviour's native 
dialect, Bar nosho, the Son of Man, means man gener- 
ically ; the filial part of the compound denotes the iden- 
tity and purity of the generic idea. 

This view commends itself, moreover, at once as the 
most natural and significant, in such passages as, "Ye 
shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God as- 
cending and descending upon the Son of man" (John 
1 : 51) ; "He that came down from heaven, even the Son 
of man which is in heaven" (John 3: 13) ; "The Son of 
man hath power to forgive sins" ( Matt. 9:6; Mark 
2: 10) ; "The Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath- 
day" (Matt. 12: 8; Mark 2: 28) ; "Except ye eat the 
flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no 
life in you" (John 6: 53) ; "The Son of man shall come 
in the glory of his Father ;" 25 "The Son of man is 
come to save" (Matt. 18: 11; comp. Luke 19: 10); 
The Father "hath given him authority to execute judg- 
ment also, because he is the Son of man" (John 5: 27). 
Even those passages which are quoted for the opposite 
view, receive, in our interpretation, a greater force and 

85 Matt. 16:27; compare 19:28; 24:30; 25:31; 26:64; Luke 
21:27, 36. 



82 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

beauty from the sublime contrast which places the vol- 
untary condescension and humiliation of Christ in the 
most striking light, as when he says : "Foxes have holes, 
and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man 
hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 9 : 58) ; or, "Who- 
soever will be chief among you, let him be your servant ; 
even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" 
(Matt. 20: 27, 28). 

Thus the manhood of Christ, rising far above all 
ordinary manhood, though freely coming down to its 
lowest ranks with a view to their elevation and redemp- 
tion, is already the portal of his Godhood. 

42. Son of God. — But he calls himself at the same 
time, and he is most frequently called by his disciples, 
the Son of God, in an equally emphatic sense. He is not 
merely a son of God among others, — angels, archangels, 
princes, judges, and redeemed men, — but the Son of 
God as no other being ever was, is, or can be ; all others 
being sons or children of God only by derivation or 
adoption, after a new spiritual birth, and in depen- 
dence on his absolute and eternal Sonship. 26 He is, as 
his favorite disciple calls him, the only -be got ten Son, or, 
as the old Catholic theology expresses it, "eternally be- 
gotten of the substance of the Father." In this high 
sense the title is freely given to him by his disciples, 27 
without a remonstrance on his part; and by God the 
Father himself at his baptism and at the transfigura- 
tion. 28 It is significant, too, that, while he directs us 
to address God as "our Father," he himself always ad- 

^Matt. 11:27; 21:37; 22:42; 26:63f.; 27:43; Mark 12:6; 
13:32; 14:62; Luke 10:22; John 5:19-26; 9:35-38; 10:36; 11:4; 
14: 13 # 17: 1 • 19: 7. 

* 2T Matt.' 16:16; Mark 3:11; John 1:18, 34, 49; 11:27; 20:31. 

28 Matt. 3:17; Luke 3:22; Matt. 17; 5; Luke 9:35. 



CHRIST'S OWN TESTIMONY 83 

dresses him : "My Father," or "Father" simply, because 
he sustains a peculiar relation to him far above the 
level of human children of God, who are made such only 
by regeneration and adoption. 

43. Central Place of Christ's Person. — Christ 
founds his whole doctrine and kingdom on his own per- 
son. His divine-human person is his constant theme, 
his cause. He is himself the impersonation of the gospel. 
He makes the highest claims without the remotest sense 
of pride or ambition or vanity, but with the simplicity 
and authority of self-evident truth. Hence his words 
have such an overwhelming power over the hearts. 
"Verily, verily, I say unto you." So God speaks in 
the Old Testament, but no man. "If ye believe not 
that I am he, ye shall die in your sins" (John 8: 24). 
What a majesty is implied in this declaration! 

Christ represents himself constantly as being "not 
of this world," but "sent from God," as having "come 
from God," and as being "in heaven," while living on 
earth ^John 3: 13). He not only announces and pro- 
claims the truth as other messengers of God, but de- 
clares himself to be "the Light of the World" (John 8: 
12) ; "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John 14: 6) ; 
"the Resurrection and the Life" (John 11: 25). "All 
things," he says, "are delivered unto me of my Father ; 
and no man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither 
knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to 
whomsoever the Son will reveal him" (Matt. 11: 27). 
He invites the weary and heavy-laden to come to him for 
rest and peace (Matt. 11: 28) ; he promises life in the 
highest sense, even eternal life, to every one who believes 
in him ; 29 he claims and admits himself to be the Christ, 
or the Messiah, of whom Moses and the prophets of old 

"John 3:36; 5:24; 6:40, 47, 50-58; 11:25. 



84 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

testify, and the King of Israel. 30 When, in view of his 
approaching death, and under a solemn appeal to the 
living God, he was challenged by the Jewish high priest, 
in the name of the venerable though corrupt theocracy, 
with the question: "Art thou the Christ [the promised 
Messiah], the Son of God? " he calmly and deliberately 
answered in the affirmative, and pointed him to his 
glorious return in the clouds of heaven; thus proclaim- 
ing himself, in the moment of the deepest humiliation 
and in the face of the apparent triumph of the powers of 
darkness, the Godlike Ruler and Judge of mankind! 
(Matt. 26: 63-65.) 

The only choice here is between a truly divine man 
and a mad blasphemer. The high priest understood 
the meaning of this solemn affirmation better than many 
modern writers : he rent his sacerdotal garment, and ex- 
claimed in indignation and horror: "He hath spoken 
blasphemy ! " 

44. Lawgiver of New Dispensation. — Jesus, more- 
over, repeatedly represents himself as the Lawgiver of 
the new and last dispensation (Matt. 5: 22-24; 28: 19, 
20) ; as the Founder of a spiritual kingdom coextensive 
with the race, and everlasting as eternity itself ; 31 as 
the appointed Judge of the quick and the dead ; 32 as 
the only Mediator between God and man ; as the Saviour 
of the world. 33 He parts from his disciples with these 
sublime words : "All power is given unto me in heaven 
and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the 

80 John 4:26; 5:36, 39; Matt. 14:33; 16:16 f.; 26:63f.; etc. 

81 Matt. 16:19; 27:11; Luke 22:30; John 18:36. Compare 
Dan. 7:13; Luke 1:33. 

82 John 5:22, 25-27; Matt. 25:31 ff., etc. 

M Matt. 18:11; Luke 9:56; 19:10; John 3: 17; 5:34; 10:9; 
12:47. Compare Luke 1:47; 2:11; John 4:42, etc. 



CHRIST'S OWN TESTIMONY 85 

Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to observe all 
things whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 
28: 18-20). 

Here he claims such a relation to the eternal Father 
and the Holy Spirit as implies both the equality of 
substance and the distinction of person, and leads with 
logical necessity to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 
For this doctrine alone saves the divinity of Christ and 
of the Holy Spirit, without affecting the fundamental 
truth of the Unity of the Godhead ; and keeps the proper 
medium between an abstract and lifeless monotheism and 
a polytheistic tritheism. 

Christ always distinguishes himself from God the 
Father, who sent him, whose works he came to fulfil, 
whose will he obeys, by whose power he performs his 
miracles, to whom he prays, and with whom he com- 
munes, as a self-conscious personal being. And so he 
distinguishes himself with equal clearness from the Holy 
Spirit, whom he received at his baptism, whom he 
breathed into his disciples, and whom he promised to 
send and did send on them as the other Paraclete or 
Advocate, as the Spirit of truth and holiness, with the 
whole fulness of the accomplished salvation. But he 
never makes a similar distinction between himself and 
the Son of God; on the contrary, he identifies himself 
with the Son of God, and uses this term, as already re- 
marked, in a sense which implies much more than the 
Jewish conception of the Messiah, and nothing short of 
the equality of essence or substance. 

45. Conscious Pre-existence. — For he claims, as the 
Son of God, a real self-conscious pre-existence before 
man, and even before the world; consequently, also, be- 
fore time ; for time was created with the world. Hence 



86 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

the Arian notion of a temporal pre-existence of Christ is 
metaphysically untenable. It assumes a creature to have 
existed before the creation, and a finite being to have 
begun existence before time. Before the act of creation, 
there was nothing but God and eternity. Time is the 
necessary form under which the world exists successively, 
as space is the form under which all material substances 
exist simultaneously. Time, before the world, could only 
have referred to God, who does not exist in time, but in 
eternity. "Before Abraham was born/ 9 or began to be, 
says Christ, "J am" (John 8: 58); significantly using 
two distinct verbs, and the past tense in the one and the 
present in the other case, to mark the difference be- 
tween man's temporal and his own eternal mode of ex- 
istence. In the sacerdotal prayer, he asks to be clothed 
again with the glory which he had with the Father 
before the foundation of the world (John 17: 5). He 
assumes divine names and attributes as far as consistent 
with his state of humiliation; he demands and receives 
divine honors (John 5: 23); he freely and repeatedly 
exercises the prerogative of pardoning sin in his own 
name, which the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees, with 
a logic whose force is irresistible on their premises, looked 
upon as blasphemous presumption ; 34 he familiarly 
classes himself with the infinite Jehovah in one common 
plural, and boldly declares: "He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father" (John 14: 9) ; "I and the Father 
are one" (John 10: 30 ). 35 He co-ordinates himself, in 
the baptismal formula, as we have seen, with the Divine 
Father, and the Divine Spirit (Matt. 28: 19); and 

84 Matt. 9:6; Luke 5:20-24; 7:47, 48. 

85 The passage teaches, certainly, more than the ethical unity 
of will: it asserts, according to the context, the unity of power 
which is based on the unity of essence. 



CHRIST'S OWN TESTIMONY 87 

allows himself to be called by Thomas, in the name of all 
the Apostles, "Lord and God" (John 20: 28). 

46. Significance of Christ's Claims.— These are the 
most astounding and transcendent pretensions ever set 
up by any being. He, the humblest and lowliest of 
men, makes them repeatedly and uniformly to the last, 
in the face of the whole world, — even in the darkest hour 
of suffering. He makes them, not in swelling, pompous, 
ostentatious language, which almost necessarily springs 
from false pretensions, but in a natural, spontaneous 
style, with perfect ease, freedom, and composure, as a 
native prince would speak of the attributes and scenes 
of royalty at his father's court. He never falters or 
doubts, never apologizes for them, never enters into an 
explanation; he sets them forth as self-evident truths, 
which need only be stated to challenge the belief and 
submission of mankind. 

Now, suppose for a moment a purely human teacher, 
however great and good; suppose a Moses or Elijah, 
a John the Baptist, an Apostle Paul, or John, — not to 
speak of any uninspired teacher, — to say: "I am the 
Light of the World;" "I am the Way, the Truth, and 
the Life ;" "I and the Father are one ;" and to call upon 
all men, "Come unto me;" "Follow me," that you may 
find "life" and "peace," which cannot be found else- 
where: would it not create a universal feeling of pity 
or indignation? No human being on earth could set 
up the least of these pretensions without being set down 
at once as a madman or a blasphemer. 

But from the mouth of Christ these colossal pre- 
tensions excite neither pity nor indignation, nor even 
the least feeling of incongruity or impropriety. We 
read and hear them over and over again without sur- 
prise. They seem perfectly natural, and well sustained 
by the most extraordinary life and the most extraor- 



88 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

dinary works. There is no room here for the least 
suspicion of vanity, pride, or self-deception. For these 
eighteen hundred years, these claims have been acknowl- 
edged by millions of people of all classes and conditions, 
the most learned as well as the most ignorant, with an 
instinctive sense of the perfect agreement of what Christ 
claimed to be with what he really was. 

Is not this fact most remarkable? Is it not a tri- 
umphant vindication of Christ's claims? And can we 
deny the truth, and refuse to acknowledge his divinity, 
without destroying his veracity, and overthrowing the 
very foundation of his moral goodness and purity, which 
are universally acknowledged even by heretics and un- 
believers ? If he, the wisest, the best, the holiest of men, 
the greatest teacher and benefactor of the race, — ac- 
knowledged as such by the common consent of the 
civilized world, — declares himself one with the Father, 
and so identifies himself in will and aim, in essence and 
attributes, with the infinite God, to an extent and in a 
sense that no man or angel or archangel could do for a 
moment without blasphemy or insanity, and if he re- 
ceives the divine adoration from his own disciples, 
how can we, in logical consistency, as well as in harmony 
with the moral and religious instincts of our nature, re- 
fuse to fall down before him, and, with Thomas, to ex- 
claim from the depths of our soul : "My Lord and my 
God"? 

This is the "testimonium animce naturaliter Chris- 
tiana," to use a celebrated expression of Tertullian. It 
is the testimony of the soul which is originally made for 
Christ, and longs for him, and finds no satisfaction of 
its infinite desires for truth, beauty, and goodness, until 
it believes in Christ who is the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life, the divine Man and the incarnate God in one undi- 
divided person forever. 



CHAPTER XIV 

EXAMINATION OF FALSE 
THEORIES 



47. THE DENIAL OF MIRACLES. Hume's assumption. 

48. EVIDENCE OF THEIR REALITY. 

49. GENERAL ARGUMENT. True miracles are above 

nature, not against nature. 

50. AS ATTRIBUTED TO CHRIST. 

51. AS ATTRIBUTED TO THE DISCIPLES. 

52. THAT CHRIST HIMSELF WAS DECEIVED. 

53. THAT THE EVANGELISTS WERE DECEIVED. 

54. THE MYTHICAL HYPOTHESIS. 

55. THEORY EXAMINED. 

56. AN INSURMOUNTABLE DIFFICULTY. 

57. INVERSION OF NATURAL ORDER. 

58. CONTRARY TO FACTS. 

59. THE LEGENDARY HYPOTHESIS. 
59a. HOSTILE TO MIRACLES. 

47. The Denial of Miracles.— There is no other so- 
lution of the mighty problem within the reach of hu- 
man learning and ingenuity than the one given by 
Christ himself. 

The infidel and semi-infidel theories of Christ's per- 
son substitute an unnatural wonder and moral monstros- 
ity in the place of the supernatural miracle which they 
endeavor to escape. 

Hume says, in his famous "Essay on Miracles": 
"When any one tells me that he saw a dead man restored 
to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it 

89 



90 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

be more probable that this person should either deceive 
or be deceived, or that the fact he relates should really 
have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the 
other; and, according to the superiority which I dis- 
cover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the 
greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would 
be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, 
and not till then, can he pretend to demand my belief 
or opinion." We need not fear this test, and can turn 
it in our case against Hume and against every doubter 
of the great miracle of Christ's person. 

48. Evidence of Their Reality.— The life of Christ 
was not spent in an obscure corner (Acts 26: 26), 
but before the eyes of the people, before Pharisees and 
Sadducees, before Herod and Pilate, before Jews and 
Romans, before friends and foes, in Galilee, Samaria, 
and Judea. His history was openly proclaimed again 
and again by eye-witnesses and their pupils before the 
people and the Sanhedrin, from Jerusalem to Rome. It 
was believed by thousands of contemporary Jews and 
Gentiles, in spite of bitter persecution and death. It 
was sealed by the martyrdom of Apostles, Evangelists, 
and Christians of every grade of society. It is better 
attested by external and internal evidence than any 
history in the world. 

The contemporaries of Jesus, his enemies as well as 
his friends, believed in his power of miracles, with this 
difference: that the one traced it to Satan, the other to 
God. Is it credible that John the Baptist, of whom 
no miracles are recorded, the twelve Apostles, the seventy 
disciples, the learned and clear-headed Paul, the Evan- 
gelists, Nicodemus, the hostile Pharisees and Sadducees, 
the Sanhedrin, and the common people in Jerusalem 
and the villages of Galilee who witnessed his mighty 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 91 

works, should all have been radically mistaken? Had 
they not eyes and ears, and common sense as well as we? 
Is there a more palpable example of obvious honesty 
and truthfulness in literature than the pages of the 
canonical Gospels and Epistles? The disciples were by 
no means over credulous. Thomas was decidedly skepti- 
cal ; the rest are often censured for their want of faith, 
and it was only after the resurrection that they reached 
the full measure of faith. The unbelieving Pharisees 
and Sadducees had every motive to deny the miracles of 
Jesus, but they could not do it without contradicting 
the testimony of their senses. No miracles are recorded 
during the thirty years before he entered on his public 
ministry. This silence is very significant, and an in- 
direct argument for the truthfulness of the canonical, 
as compared with the apocryphal, gospels. He exer- 
cised the power of miracles sparingly ; he never obtruded 
them on anybody ; he made no display ; he never sought 
gain or honor. His miracles were, without exception, 
prompted by the purest motives and aimed at the glory 
of God and the benefit of men; they are miracles of 
love and mercy, full of instruction and significance, and 
in harmony with his character and mission. 

49. General Argument.— The historical evidence and 
the internal character of the miracles are entirely in 
their favor. To reject them imposes upon us the in- 
credible belief that a whole generation of friends and 
foes were radically mistaken in a matter of common ex- 
perience. 

But we are told that miracles are impossible. This 
is an a priori assumption and pseudo-philosophical preju- 
dice, in the face of the apostolic age, the whole Bible, 
and the common belief of mankind in all ages. It is an 
unproved dogma turned against facts. It proceeds from 



92 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

a pantheistic or materialistic philosophy which, as Bacon 
says, leads away from God, while true philosophy leads 
back to him. If we believe in a personal God, the Maker 
and Ruler of the world, we shall find no difficulty in 
miracles. The act of creation is the first and greatest 
miracle, which no reasonable man can deny, any more 
than the fact of his own birth, which, nevertheless, 
no philosopher can understand or explain. This world 
and the life in it must have had a beginning. Cuvier 
says: "Life has not always been on earth, and it is 
possible to fix the time when it originated." Agassiz 
and other naturalists are of the same opinion. Geology 
and biology prove the gradual growth and development 
of earth and its inhabitants. The theory of progressive 
development itself necessarily leads back to a beginning; 
and this cannot be found in nothing (for ex nihilo nihil 
fit), nor in dead matter, which could never produce 
mind, but only in the creative will of an infinite intelli- 
gence working on a plan of infinite wisdom. The same 
Almighty power which called heaven and earth and man 
into being still controls and directs the laws of nature 
and of history. These laws are not iron chains by 
which their author has bound himself hand and foot, 
but elastic cords, rather, which he can expand or con- 
tract at his sovereign will. 

It is incorrect to say that miracles are suspensions or 
violations of the unchangeable laws of nature, and there- 
fore impossible. True miracles are above nature, not 
against nature, as revelation is above reason, not against 
reason. They are a manifestation of a higher law, 
which the lower laws must obey. We find in nature 
itself one kingdom ruling over the other, the animal 
over the vegetable, and man over both. In man, again, 
the mind rules over the body, Man is supernatural as 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 93 

compared with the lower nature; and the mind is a 
miracle as compared with the body. If we raise our arm 
in obedience to our will, the law of gravity is held in 
temporary abeyance, or subordinated to the higher law 
of free action, but not abrogated or discontinued. Every 
virtue is a victory over nature, though not a suspension 
or annihilation of it. If a man can act upon nature 
from without and control it, why not much more God, 
the independent Lord of creation? The control of 
nature by the will of man is no miracle, in the proper 
sense of the term, but it involves all the speculative 
difficulties which are urged against it by materialists 
and atheists. Reasoning from analogy, we have a right 
to ascend to a higher sphere. 

The belief in the supernatural and miraculous, far 
from being a sign of intellectual weakness, has been held 
by the greatest minds in all ages and nations. It is 
only since the last century that the opposite tendency 
has set in, but philosophy itself will return from mate- 
rialism and atheism, which explain nothing, to Christian 
theism which alone accounts for the problem of the 
world, by tracing the effect to a satisfactory cause. 

To return to the life of Christ, the presumption is 
altogether in favor of his having performed extraordi- 
nary works in correspondence with his extraordinary 
person. If he really towers so high above other mortals 
as we have seen, and as is generally admitted even by 
unbelievers, we must expect from him deeds which equally 
rise above the ordinary level. To believe in his miracu- 
lous person is to believe in his miraculous works. To 
do the former without the latter is a palpable incon- 
sistency. 

We shall now examine in detail the infidel theories 
of the Life and Character of Christ. They may be re- 



94 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

duced to three: the hypothesis of Imposture, the hy- 
pothesis of Enthusiasm, and the hypothesis of Poetic 
Fiction. In other words, the gospel story is either a 
conscious lie, or a self-delusion, or a poem. In each of 
the three cases the result may be traced either to Christ 
himself or to his disciples. The former method is more 
offensive, but more logical ; the latter makes the Apostles 
the real authors of Christianity, which is absurd. The 
three hypotheses exhaust the possibilities of the case, 
but they admit of various modifications and partly run 
into each other. They agree in rejecting the truth of 
the supernatural and divine in Christ's character, but 
otherwise they widely differ and refute each other. The 
theory of imposture is the oldest and the most revolting ; 
the theory of poetic fiction is the latest and most in- 
genious, but is logically forced back to the former, from 
which it professed at first to shrink in moral indignation ; 
the theory of enthusiasm occupies an untenable middle 
ground. Hence the alternative remains as at first. 
Christ is either an impostor and blasphemer who wrought 
miracles by Beelzebub, and was justly crucified by the 
Jews, or he is the Son of the living God and Saviour, 
and rightly worshiped by the Christian Church. 

I. The Theory of Imposture 

50. As Attributed to Christ. — The hypothesis of im- 
posture is so revolting to moral as well as common sense, 
that its mere statement is its condemnation. It was 
invented by the Jews who crucified the Lord to cover 
their crime, but has never been seriously carried out, 
and no scholar of any decency and self-respect would 
now dare to profess it openly. How, in the name of 
logic, common sense, and experience, could an impostor 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 95 

— that is, a deceitful, selfish, depraved man — have in- 
vented, and consistently maintained from beginning to 
end, the purest and noblest character known in history 
with the most perfect air of truth and reality? How 
could he have conceived and successfully carried out a 
plan of unparalleled beneficence, moral magnitude, and 
sublimity, and sacrificed his own life for it, in the face 
of the strongest prejudices of his people and age? 

51. As Attributed to the Disciples. — The difficulty 
is not much lessened by shifting the charge of fraud 
from Christ to his disciples, who were said by the lying 
Sanhedrin to have stolen his body and thus humbugged 
the world (Matt. 28 : 13). But the Apostles and Evan- 
gelists were anything but designing hypocrites and de- 
ceivers, and leave upon every reader the impression of 
an artless simplicity and honesty rarely equaled and 
never surpassed by any writers, learned or unlearned, 
of ancient or modern times. What imaginable motive 
could have induced them to engage in such a wicked 
scheme, when they knew that the whole world would 
persecute them even to death? How could they have 
formed and sustained a conspiracy for such a purpose, 
without ever falling out, or betraying themselves by 
some inconsistent word or act? 

And who can seriously believe for a moment that the 
Christian Church for these eighteen hundred years, now 
embracing nearly the whole civilized world, and among 
them the strongest intellects and the noblest hearts — 
divines, philosophers, poets, orators, statesmen, and 
benefactors of the race — could have been duped and 
fooled by a Galilean carpenter, or by a dozen illiterate 
fishermen? Verily, this lowest form of infidelity is the 
grossest insult to all sound reason and sense, and to the 
dignity of human nature. 



96 THE PERSON OP CHRIST 

II. The Theory of Enthusiasm or Self- 
Deception 

52. That Christ Himself Was Deceived.— The hy- 
pothesis of enthusiasm or self-deception, though less 
disreputable, is equally unreasonable, in view of the uni- 
form clearness, calmness, self-possession, humility, dig- 
nity, and patience of Christ, — qualities the very oppo- 
site of those which characterize an enthusiast. We 
might imagine a Jew of that age to have fancied himself 
the Messiah and the Son of God ; but instead of oppos- 
ing all the popular notions, and discouraging all the 
temporal hopes of his countrymen, he would, like Bar- 
cochba of a later period, have headed a rebellion against 
the hated tyranny of the Romans, and endeavored to 
establish a temporal kingdom. Enthusiasm, which in 
this case must have bordered on madness itself, instead 
of calmly and patiently bearing the malignant opposi- 
tion of the leaders of the nation, would have broken out 
in violent passion and precipitate action. 

Christ's intellect is truly marvelous. He never erred 
in his judgment of men and things; he was never de- 
ceived by appearances ; he penetrated through the sur- 
face, and always went straight to the heart and marrow ; 
he never asked a question which was not perfectly ap- 
propriate ; he never gave an answer which was not fully 
to the point, or which could be better conceived and 
expressed. How often did he silence his cavilers, the 
shrewd and cunning priests and scribes, by a short 
sentence which hit the nail on the head, or struck like 
lightning into their conscience, or wisely evaded the trap 
laid for him ! When the Pharisees and Herodians, with 
the malicious intention to entangle him into their politi- 
cal party quarrels, asked him whether it was lawful to 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 97 

pay taxes to the Roman government, he, perceiving their 
wickedness, called for a denarius with the superscription 
of the Roman emperor, and said: "Render unto Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
that are God's." This word, which settles, in principle, 
the whole vexed question between Church and State, 
may be called the wisest answer ever given by any man. 
When the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, laid 
before him a perplexing question concerning the mar- 
riage relation in the future state, he solved the difficulty 
by removing all foundation for it; and then, appealing 
to the very part of the Old Testament which they pro- 
fessed to believe, to the exclusion of the later 
parts of the canon, he asked them: "Have ye 
not read that which was spoken unto you by God, 
saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of 
Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God 
of the dead, but of the living" By this short comment 
he opened the profound meaning of this title of God, 
which no one had seen in it before, but which, being once 
brought to light, was so clear and transparent that 
even the Sadducees were silenced and the multitude 
astonished. And when the sanctimonious hypocrites, 
in the case of the adulterous woman, hoped to involve 
him in a contradiction with the rigor of the law, he 
brought the matter home to their own conscience by 
saying: "He that is without sin among you, let him 
first cast a stone at her;" and they, "being convicted 
by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning 
at the eldest, even unto the last." Christ never lost the 
balance of mind under excitement, nor the clearness of 
vision under embarrassment ; he never violated the most 
perfect good taste in any of his sayings. 

Is such an intellect — clear as the sky, bracing as the 



98 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

mountain air, sharp and penetrating as a sword, thor- 
oughly healthy and vigorous, always ready and always 
self-possessed — liable to a radical and most serious de- 
lusion concerning his own character and mission? Pre- 
posterous imagination! 

Let us hear the most eminent Unitarian divine on 
this hypothesis : — 

"The charge," says Dr. Channing, "of an extrava- 
gant, self -deluding enthusiasm is the last to be fastened 
on Jesus. Where can we find the traces of it in his 
history? Do we detect them in the calm authority of 
his precepts ; in the mild, practical, and beneficent spirit 
of his religion; in the unlabored simplicity of the lan- 
guage with which he unfolds his high powers and the 
sublime truths of religion; or in the good sense, the 
knowledge of human nature, which he always discovers 
in his estimate and treatment of the different classes of 
men with whom he acted? Do we discover this enthusi- 
asm in the singular fact, that whilst he claimed power 
in the future world, and always turned men's minds to 
heaven, he never indulged his own imagination, or stimu- 
lated that of his disciples, by giving vivid pictures or 
any minute description of that unseen state? The truth 
is, that, remarkable as was the character of Jesus, it 
was distinguished by nothing more than by calmness and 
self-possession. This trait pervades his other excellences. 
How calm was his piety ! Point me, if you can, to one 
vehement, passionate expression of his religious feelings. 
Does the Lord's Prayer breathe a feverish enthusiasm? 
. . . His benevolence, too, though singularly earnest 
and deep, was composed and serene. He never lost the 
possession of himself in his sympathy with others; was 
never hurried into the impatient and rash enterprises 
of an enthusiastic philanthropy ; but did good with the 



/ 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 99 

tranquillity and constancy which mark the providence 
of God." * 

53. That the Evangelists Were Deceived.— The 

hypothesis of delusion may be shifted from Christ to 
the Apostles and Evangelists. It may be supposed that 
they honestly mistook an extraordinary man for a divine 
being, and extraordinary medical cures for supernatural 
miracles. 

This is the view of the older rationalistic or the 
natural interpretation, so called, of the gospel history. 
It forms a parallel to the heathen rationalism of Eu- 
hemerus, of the Cyrenaic school: he explained the gods 
of the Greek mythology as human sages, heroes, kings, 
and tyrants, whose superior knowledge or great deeds 
secured them divine honors and the hero-worship of 
posterity. 

The rationalistic explanation, after having been tried 
first, by Eichhorn and others, with the miracles of the 
Old Testament, was fully developed and applied to the 
gospel-history, with an unusual degree of patient and 
painstaking learning and acumen, by H. E. G. Paulus, 
of Heidelberg. 36 

This German Euhemerus takes the gospel-history as 
actual history ; but, by a critical separation of what he 
calls fact from what he calls judgment of the actor or 
narrator, he explains it exclusively from natural causes, 
and thus brings it down to the level of every-day expe- 
rience. Jesus was indeed a wise, noble, and virtuous 
Rabbi, who distinguished himself above all his contem- 
poraries by works of philanthropy, medical skill, perhaps 

88 Dr. Paulus was born at Leonberg, in the kingdom of Wurt- 
temberg, 1761 ; was successively professor in different universi- 
ties; at last in Heidelberg, where he died in 1851. His rational- 
istic exegesis is laid down in his Commentary on the Gospels, 
published since 1800; and in his Life of Jesus, 1828. 



100 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

also magnetic cures, and exerted an uncommon influence 
upon the heart. But the supernatural events related 
by the Evangelists, and sincerely believed by them, are 
erroneous conceptions and innocent amplifications of his- 
torical facts which fall within the sphere of the laws of 
nature. Sometimes the fault lies only in the reader or 
interpreter, and the supposed miracle turns out to be a 
grammatical blunder; as, for example, when Christ's 
"walking on the sea" (Matt. 14: 25), which means 
simply his walking on the bank of the sea, or on the 
high shore above the sea, — a very easy and natural per- 
formance indeed ! — is turned into a walking on the sur- 
face of the sea, or over the sea. In most cases the mis- 
take originated with the first observers. 

This interpretation, which claims to be "natural," 
turns out to be very unnatural, and contradicts the 
context, the laws of hermeneutics, and common sense it- 
self. Its exposition is wretched imposition. 

It is only necessary to give some specimens from 
the exegesis of Paulus and his school. 

The glory of the Lord, which, in the night of his 
birth, shone around the shepherds, was simply an ignis 
fatuus, or a meteor, or a lantern which was flashed in 
their eyes. The miracle at Christ's baptism may be 
easily reduced to thunder and lightning, and a sudden 
disappearance of the clouds. The tempter in the wilder- 
ness was a cunning Pharisee, but was mistaken by the 
Evangelists for the devil, who does not exist, except in 
the imagination of the superstitious. The quieting of 
the storm on the lake might be traced to a happy acci- 
dent, in connection with the calmness and dignity of 
Jesus. His miraculous cures turn out, on closer exami- 
nation, to be simply deeds of philanthropy, or of medical 
skill, or of good luck. Thus the healing of the blind was 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 101 

accomplished through an efficacious powder applied to 
the eye,— a circumstance which was unnoticed by the 
miracle-loving reporters. The coin for the payment of 
tribute was to be obtained by Peter, not in the mouth of 
the fish, but by selling the fish in the market. The 
changing of water into wine was an innocent and benevo- 
lent wedding-joke; and the delusion of the company, by 
the sudden appearance of the wine previously provided 
by the disciples, must be charged on the twilight, not 
upon Christ. The feeding of the five thousand is easily 
explained by provisions which the people brought with 
them in their pockets ; Jesus advising the rich to share 
their abundance with the poor. The daughter of Jairus, 
the youth of Nain, Lazarus, and Jesus himself, were 
raised, not from real death, but simply from a trance 
or swoon. The angels of the resurrection were nothing 
more nor less than the white linen clothes which the 
pious mistook for celestial beings. And, finally, the 
ascension of our Lord resolves itself into his sudden dis- 
appearance behind a cloud that accidentally intervened 
between him and his disciples. 

And yet these very Evangelists, who, according to 
this most unnatural "natural exegesis," must have been 
destitute of the most ordinary talent of observation, and 
even of common sense, contrived to paint a character 
and to write a story, which, in sublimity and interest, 
throw the productions of the proudest historians into 
the shade and have exerted an irresistible charm upon 
Christendom for these eighteen hundred years ! 

No wonder that those absurdities of a misguided 
learning and ingenuity hardly survived their author. 
It is a decided merit of Strauss, that he, in his larger 
work on the Life of Jesus, has thoroughly and step 
by step refuted the system of his predecessor, and given 



102 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

it the critical death-blow. He very properly says: "If 
the Gospels are taken to be historical documents, the 
miracle cannot be expelled from them." Therefore, to 
get rid of it, he denies their historical character and 
apostolic origin. Renan too, in his "Essay on the Crit- 
ical Historians of Jesus," speaks quite contemptuously 
of this "very narrow exegesis of rationalism," this 
"shabby method of interpretation," "an exegesis made 
up of subtilties founded on the mechanical use of a few 
incidents, — ecstasy, lightning, storm, cloud," etc. ; and 
says: "The so-called rationalistic interpretation may 
have satisfied the first bold desire of the human mind on 
its taking possession of a long- forbidden domain; but 
experience could not but disclose very soon the inex- 
cusable defects, the dryness, the coarseness of it. Never 
was better realized the ingenious allegory of the 
daughters of Minos, who were turned into bats for hav- 
ing seriously criticised the vulgar credences. There 
is as much simplicity and credulity, and much less 
poetry, in clumsily discussing a legend in its details, as 
in accepting it, once for all, as it is." 37 

So one infidel refutes the other, and by the very 
process undermines his own system. Strauss and Renan 
have fared no better than Paulus, who was their equal 
in learning and acumen. 

III. The Theory of Poetical Fiction 

The least dishonorable, and the most plausible, of 
the false theories of the life of Christ, is the hypothesis 
of poetical fiction. This may, again, assume two forms, 
— the mythical and the legendary. The former derives 

8T Renan, Studies of Religious History and Criticism, trans- 
lated by O. B. Frothingham, pp. 176, 177. New York, 1864. 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 103 

its support mainly from the formation of the ancient 
myths of heathen gods and demigods ; the latter, from 
the medieval legends of Christian martyrs and saints. 

The one was matured and carried out by David 
Friedrich Strauss, with the patient research, learning, 
and solidity of a German scholar; the other, by Joseph 
Ernest Renan, with the brilliancy, elegancy, and levity 
of a Parisian novelist. The one was written for students, 
the other for the people; the one breathes the air of a 
library, is cold and heartless, the other arose under the 
fresh impressions of travel in the Holy Land, as a fifth 
Gospel, broken, ruined, yet legible, and is enlivened by 
picturesque sketches ; the one rests on the philosophical 
basis of a speculative or logical pantheism, the other on 
that of a sentimental or poetical pantheism. Strauss's 
Leben Jesu is related to Renan's Vie de Jesus as the 
heavy armor of a medieval knight to the parade uniform 
of a holiday soldier, as a siege cannon to a popgun, as 
an iron statue to a tawdry wax figure; but both start 
essentially from the same naturalistic premises and ar- 
rive at the same conclusions. They are equally opposed 
to the miraculous and supernatural in the life of our 
Saviour, and leave a mere spectral shadow of the real 
Jesus of the Gospels. 

54. The Mythical Hypothesis. — Dr. Strauss 38 wrote 
two works on the life of Jesus : a large one for scholars, 
which appeared first in 1835, in two volumes ; and a 
condensed one of a more popular character, in 1864, in 
one volume. In both he maintains the same theory, 
with unimportant modifications. The former work is the 
ablest and most elaborate attack upon the gospel history 

M David Friedrich Strauss, Doctor of Philosophy, was born 
January 27, 1808, at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, in Wurttem- 
berg. He died in his native town, Ludwigsburg, 1874. 



104 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

ever made, and a well-arranged storehouse of all the 
older arguments of infidelity. 

Strauss has found an eloquent advocate in the erratic 
genius and misguided philanthropist, Theodore Parker, 
who passed like a brilliant meteor over the American 
skies to disappear in a foreign land. 39 

What Gabler, Vater, De Wette, and other critics, 
had already done with the miracles of the Old Testa- 
ment and some portions of the New, Strauss has fully 
matured and systematically carried out with reference 
to the whole life of Christ. He sinks the gospel history, 
as to the mode of its origin and reality, substantially to 
a par with the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome. 

A myth is the representation of a religious idea or 
truth in the form of a fictitious narrative. In this re- 
spect it resembles the fable and the parable, but differs 
from both by blending the idea with the fact, without 
any consciousness of a difference between them. The 
fable is a fictitious story, based upon palpable impossi- 
bilities, — as thinking and speaking animals, — and in- 
vented for the express purpose of inculcating some moral 
maxim or lesson of prudence; the parable is likewise a 
fictitious narrative, deliberately produced but based upon 
possibilities, and thus intrinsically truthful, for the 
purpose of illustrating a spiritual truth; a myth is 
unconsciously produced with the most simple and un- 
reflecting faith in the actual occurrence of the story. 
The mytho-poetic faculty presupposes — and this, we 
may remark, by way of anticipation, is a telling argu- 
ment against the theory of Strauss — a childlike age of 
the human race, an entire absence of reflection and criti- 
cism. It works like the imagination of children, who 

39 Theodore Parker, born in Massachusetts, 1810; died in Flor- 
ence, 1860. 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 105 

delight in stories, invent stories, and believe their own 
stories without the least misgiving or doubt, without 
raising the question of truth or falsehood. In this way 
(according to the theory of some distinguished classical 
scholars like Ottfried Miiller and Grote) the Greek 
mythology took its rise, as the spontaneous growth of a 
childlike fancy, which peopled the air and the sea, the 
mountains and the groves, the trees and the brooks with 
divinities, in the fullest belief in their actual existence. 
So, also, much of the legendary history of medieval 
Christianity can be accounted for without impeaching 
the motives or honesty of the narrator, yet with this 
difference, that the legends of martyrs and saints have, 
in most cases, some foundation in a psychological state 
or historical fact. The rest is either harmless poetry of 
simple souls, or pious fraud of designing monks and 
priests. 

Strauss does not deny by any means the historical 
existence of Jesus. He even admits him to have been a 
religious genius of the first magnitude. But from pan- 
theistic premises, and by a cold process of hypercritical 
dissection of the apparently contradictory accounts of 
the witnesses, he resolves all the supernatural and mirac- 
ulous elements of Christ's person and history, from his 
birth to the resurrection and ascension, into myths, or 
imaginative representations of religious ideas in the 
form of facts, which were honestly believed by the 
authors to have actually occurred. The ideas symbol- 
ized in these facts, especially the idea of the essential 
unity of the divine and human, are declared to be true 
in the abstract as applied to humanity as a whole ; but 
denied in the concrete, or in their application to an in- 
dividual. The fulness of the infinite godhead is diffused, 
as it were, throughout the whole universe, but cannot 



106 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

be shut up in Jesus of Nazareth or any single person. 
The authorship of the evangelical myths is ascribed to 
the primitive Christian community, pregnant with Jew- 
ish Messianic hopes, and kindled to hero-worship by the 
appearance of the extraordinary person of Jesus of 
Nazareth, whom they took to be the promised Messiah, 
and adorned with this innocent poetry of miracles within 
thirty or forty years after his death. 

The theory may be reduced to the following syllo- 
gism: There was a fixed idea in the Jewish mind, 
nourished by the Old Testament writings, that the Mes- 
siah would perform certain miracles — heal the sick, raise 
the dead, etc. ; there was a strong persuasion in the 
minds of the disciples of Jesus that he actually was the 
promised Messiah; therefore the mytho-poetic faculty 
instinctively invented the miracles corresponding to the 
Messianic conception, and ascribed them to him. 

In the execution of his task, Strauss avails himself, at 
the same time, of all the difficulties and objections which 
the ingenuity of unbelievers of opposite philosophical 
tendencies, from Celsus and Porphyry to Reimarus 
and Paulus, have urged against the credibility of the 
gospel narrative ; grouping them with consummate skill 
for rhetorical effect ; presenting the most complex details 
with rare clearness; changing his mode of attack from 
round assertion to cautious insinuation or suggestive 
inquiry, and then massing his forces for a final assault 
upon the citadel, against which the gates of hell shall 
never prevail. 

55. Theory Examined. — Let us now proceed to ex- 
amine the general features and defects of this theory. 

First, The philosophic foundation on which the myth- 
ical hypothesis professedly rests, is the alleged impossi- 
bility of a miracle; and this again has its root in a 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 107 

pantheistic denial of a personal God and an Almighty 
Maker of heaven and earth. But this fundamental prin- 
ciple is a mere assumption, which the author never 
attempts to prove. It is a petitio principii, and begs 
the very question which it was one of his first duties 
to discuss. Much as he boasted of possessing freedom 
from doctrinal prepossessions as a first prerequisite for a 
scientific biography of Jesus, he starts with a philo- 
sophical prejudice, which is fatal to historical impartial- 
ity, and sacrifices facts to theory. 

Secondly, The critical foundation of the mythical 
theory is as unsafe as the philosophical, and is one of the 
weakest parts of the book of Strauss, who was justly 
censured by Dr. Baur for attempting to write a criticism 
of the gospel history without a criticism of the 
Gospels. In order to avoid the necessity of sup- 
posing that Christ and the apostles were deceivers or 
self-deceived, and to allow a sufficient time for the for- 
mation of myths, he must bring down the canonical 
Gospels at least a century later than Christ. But at 
that time they were already acknowledged as canonical 
writings, and used in the Christian churches. Strauss 
has to encounter here the overwhelming mass of patristic 
testimonies in favor of the apostolic origin of these Gos- 
pels, which are far better supported than any of the 
classical writers of Greece or Rome. 

At one time, feeling the force of the unanimous voice 
of Christian antiquity, Strauss was disposed to admit 
the authenticity of the Gospel of John; but seeing the 
fatal effect of this concession upon his conclusions, he 
soon after withdrew it (in the third edition of his large 
work), and Baur and the whole Tubingen school came 
to his aid in disputing the authorship of John, notwith- 
standing the additional external evidence in favor of it 



108 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

which has since been brought to light by the discovery 
of the Philosophumena of Hippolitus ; from which it ap- 
pears that the fourth Gospel was already used by Gnos- 
tic heretics in the early part of the second century. The 
controversy concerning the origin and character of the 
canonical Gospels, into which we cannot here enter, has 
assumed half-a-dozen new phases since the first appear- 
ance of Strauss's book in 1835, and is still in an un- 
settled condition. We may never be able to determine 
the precise origin of the Gospels and their mutual re- 
lations, but Christ's teaching and Christ's example re- 
main an undoubted fact, and they cannot possibly be the 
invention of illiterate fishermen of Galilee. As to the 
fourth Gospel, the only alternative in the present stage 
of the controversy is truth, or fraud. The assumption 
of an unconscious mytho-poetical fiction is exploded by 
the later developments of the Tubingen critics. Strauss 
himself now admits, in this case, conscious fiction and 
philosophical construction, and thus approaches the very 
border of the infamous theory of imposture. 

But suppose we give up the four Gospels : there still 
remain the Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament 
to substantiate all the fundamental facts of the life of 
Christ, especially the resurrection, — the great crowning 
and sealing miracle of his work, without which the 
Apostolic Church could never have risen at all. Even 
Dr. Baur, who in bold negative and reconstructive criti- 
cism went further than any skeptic ever did, and who 
resolved most of the New Testament writing into "tend- 
ency" books written in the conscious interest of contend- 
ing parties and sections of the post-apostolic age, ulti- 
mately blended in the system of ancient Catholicism, — 
a theory, by the way, which overthrows the unconscious 
mytho-poetic origin of the Gospels, — leaves the Apoca- 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 109 

lypse of St. John, and four Epistles of St. Paul, viz., 
those to the Romans (excepting the last two chapters), 
the Corinthians and Galatians, standing as genuine 
apostolic writings. This is enough for our purpose. It 
may perhaps be imagined that an illiterate fish- 
erman of Galilee was simple and childlike enough to 
invent miracles, and to mistake the creatures of his 
fancy for actual facts. But this is a psychological im- 
possibility in the case of Paul, — the learned, acute, sub- 
tle, dialectic, well-drilled rabbi of the school of Gamaliel, 
and so long the open and bitter enemy of Christianity. 
How could he submit his strong and clear mind, and 
devote all the energies of his noble life, which made him 
one of the greatest benefactors of mankind, to a poetical 
fiction or empty dream of the very sect which he fanat- 
ically persecuted unto death? 

56. An Insurmountable Difficulty. — The difficulty 
presented here to the infidel biographers of Jesus is 
absolutely insurmountable ; the mythological hypothesis 
breaks down completely on the rock of the resurrection, 
and the conversion of Paul which is based upon it. 
Strauss must admit that Paul and all the apostles be- 
lieved in the resurrection, and could only by this belief 
pass from the despondency created by the death of 
Jesus to the joy and enthusiasm necessary to spread the 
gospel and found churches at the risk of their lives. 
But he cannot explain this astounding transition which 
took place already on the third day. He very ably 
refutes as utterly untenable the natural interpretation 
of a resurrection from a mere trance, followed after a 
short period of a sickly existence by real death, which 
would have effectually destroyed again all the hopes of 
the disciples. Instead of this, he resorts to the hypoth- 
esis of a purely subjective resurrection of Christ in the 



110 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

visionary faith of his disciples, including St. Paul, and 
the more than five hundred to whom he appeared at 
once (1 Cor. 15: 6). As if an empty dream could 
suddenly turn desponding gloom into enthusiastic joy 
and world-conquering faith, and this in so many persons 
at the same time, and lay the foundation to the in- 
destructible structure of the Christian Church ! Credat 
Judceus Apella! It is certainly much easier to believe 
that Christ truly rose from the dead, than that the 
Christian Church — the greatest institution of history — 
should have arisen from a deception or a lie. 

Here, if anywhere, we must bow before the over- 
whelming force of a most glorious fact. Dr. Baur, the 
teacher of Strauss, and his superior in learning and 
critical power, felt the difficulty, and toward the close 
of his life made the honest concession, that the conversion 
of Paul was to him a mystery, which could only be ex- 
plained by "the miracle of the resurrection." This con- 
cession overthrows the whole mythical fabric. Admit 
the resurrection of Christ, and there can be no difficulty 
with the other miracles. 

57. Inversion of Natural Order. — A third funda- 
mental error of the mythical hypothesis consists in a 
radical inversion of the natural order and relation of 
history and poetry, as it exists in any historical age like 
that in which Christ made his appearance on earth. 
Facts give rise to songs, and not vice versa. Prophecies, 
and expectations too, may foreshadow events, but do not 
create them. The real object precedes the picture of the 
artist ; the hero, the epic. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress 
presupposes the Christian experience of which it is a 
beautiful allegory. Milton's Paradise Lost could never 
have produced the belief in the fall of man, but rests on 
this belief and the fact it describes with the charm and 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 111 

splendor of sanctified genius. All the great revolutions 
in the world have been effected, not by fictitious person- 
ages, but by real living men whose power corresponds to 
their influence. So the American and French Revolu- 
tions in the eighteenth, the Puritan Revolution in the 
seventeenth, the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth 
century ; the founding of modern, medieval, and ancient 
empires; the inventions of arts, and the discoveries of 
new countries, — can all be traced to strictly historical 
and well-defined persons as originators or leaders. Why 
should Christianity, which produced the greatest of all 
moral revolutions of the race, form an exception ? Ideas, 
without living men to represent and explain them, are 
shadows and abstractions. The pantheistic philosophy 
on which the criticism of Strauss and Renan is based, 
by denying the personality of God, destroys also the 
proper significance of the personality of man, and in- 
evitably ends in denying the immortality of the soul. 

In the case before us, the difficulty is greatly in- 
creased by making, not one great towering genius, as 
Homer, but an illiterate and comparatively ignorant 
multitude, responsible for the gospel poem, which in 
purity and sublimity rises infinitely above all ancient 
mythologies. Strauss assumes that a Messianic com- 
munity in some terra incognita, probably in the midst 
of Palestine, independent of the apostles, about thirty 
or forty years after the death of Christ, produced the 
gospel history. But this is a mere fiction of his brain. 
At that time, Christianity was already planted all over 
the Roman Empire, as is evident from the Epistles of 
Paul as well as from the Acts ; and all these congrega- 
tions stood under the guidance of apostles and apostolic 
men who were eyewitnesses of the events of Christ, and 
controlled the whole Christian tradition. The Gospels, 



112 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

moreover, with tfie exception of that of Matthew, bear 
not the Jewish, but the Gentile-Christian stamp, and 
were written outside of Palestine, on Greek and Roman 
soil; which shows that the same traditions were spread 
all over the empire, and form a part of the original 
Christianity of the apostles themselves. The myth- 
ological hypothesis breaks down half-way, and is forced 
to make the apostles responsible for the story; that is, 
to charge them with downright fraud. If Christ did 
not actually perform miracles, they must have been in- 
vented by the primitive disciples, the apostles, and 
evangelists, to account at all for their rapid and uni- 
versal spread and acceptance among Jewish and Gentile 
Christians from Jerusalem to Rome. 

But admitting such a consolidated, central, and yet 
independent mytho-poetic community of the second gen- 
eration of Christians, how could this Messianic congre- 
gation itself originate without a Messiah? How could 
the disciples believe in Jesus, without the indispensable 
signs of the Messiahship? If the early Christians pro- 
duced Christ, who produced the early Christians? 
Whence did they derive their high spiritual ideal? Were 
not the Messianic expectations of the Jews at the time 
sectional, political, and carnal, — the very reverse of 
those encouraged by Christ? Who ever heard of a 
poem unconsciously produced by a mixed multitude, and 
honestly mistaken by them all for actual history ? How 
could the five hundred persons, to whom the risen Saviour 
is said to have appeared (1 Cor. 15 : 6), dream the same 
dream at the same time, and then believe it as a veritable 
fact, at the risk of their lives? How could such an 
illusion stand the combined hostility of the Jewish and 
heathen world, and the searching criticism of an age, 
not of childlike simplicity, but of high civilization, of 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 113 

critical reflection, — even of incredulity and skepticism? 
How strange, that unlettered and unskilled fishermen, 
or rather their obscure friends and pupils, and not the 
philosophers and poets of classic Greece and Rome, 
should have composed such a grand poem, and painted 
a character to whom Strauss himself is forced to assign 
the very first rank among all the religious geniuses and 
founders of religion ! And would they not rather have 
given us at best an improved picture of such a rabbi as 
Hillel or Gamaliel, or of a prophet like Elijah or John 
the Baptist, instead of a universal reformer who rises 
above all the limitations of nation or sect? 

The poets must in this case have been superior to 
the hero. St. John must have surpassed Jesus, whom he 
represented as the incarnate God. And yet the hero is 
admitted by the skeptics themselves to be the purest and 
greatest man that ever lived ! 

58. Contrary to Facts. — But where are the traces 
of a fervid imagination and mytho-poetic art in the 
gospel history? Is it not, on the contrary, remarkably 
free from all rhetorical and poetical ornament, from 
every admixture of subjective notions and feelings, even 
from the expression of sympathy, admiration, and 
praise? The writers evidently felt that the story speaks 
best for itself, and could not be improved by the art and 
skill of man. Their discrepancies, which at best do not 
affect the picture of Christ's character in the least, but 
onLy the subordinate details of his history, prove the 
absence of collusion, attest the honesty of their inten- 
tions, and confirm the general credibility of their ac- 
counts. The Gospels have the character of originality 
and freshness stamped upon every page; they breathe 
the very presence of Jesus Christ; and this constitutes 
their irresistible charm to every unsophisticated reader. 



114 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

It is the history itself which speaks to us face to face, 
without intervening reflections and subjective notions. 
The few occasional references to geography, archeology, 
and secular history, only confirm their general credi- 
bility. How different in all these respects the apocryphal 
Gospels ! They are flat, puerile, insipid, the absurd pro- 
ductions of a diseased religious imagination. Here, 
indeed, we might speak of mythical or legendary fiction, 
or of downright imposition and pious fraud. But this 
very contrast proves the truth of the original history, 
as the counterfeit implies the existence of the genuine 
coin. 

The mere fact of the Christian Church, with its 
unbroken history of eighteen hundred years, is an over- 
whelming evidence of the Christ of the Gospels ; and the 
institution of Christian baptism and the holy com- 
munion testify every day, all over the world, to the 
two fundamental doctrines of the holy Trinity, and of 
the atonement by the sacrifice on the cross. 

Strauss would make us believe in a stream without 
a fountain, in a house without a foundation, in an effect 
without a cause; for the facts which he and Renan 
leave untouched are not sufficient to account for the 
extraordinary and continued results. 

The same negative criticism which Strauss applied 
to the Evangelists, would, with equal plausibility, destroy 
the strongest chain of evidence before a court of justice, 
and resolve the life of Socrates or Charlemagne or Luther 
or Napoleon into a mythical dream. 

The secret spring of this hypercriticism is the pan- 
theistic or atheistic denial of a personal, living God, 
which consistently and professedly ends with the denial 
of personal immortality ; for the relative personality of 
man depends upon the self-conscious, self -existent, abso- 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 115 

lute personality of God. In its details, the mythical 
hypothesis is so complicated and artificial, that it cannot 
be consistently carried out. It continually crosses the 
boundary-line which divides the mythical from the men- 
dacious ; and at the most critical points, as in the origin 
of the fourth Gospel and the miracle of the resurrection, 
it is driven to the alternative of admitting the truth, or 
relapsing to the vulgar and disreputable hypothesis of 
intentional fraud, from which it professed, at the start, 
to shrink back with horror and contempt. 

59. The Legendary Hypothesis. — Renan 40 has 
eclipsed all former infidel biographers of Christ, so far 
as popularity and ephemeral effect is concerned. His 
Life of Jesus, which first appeared in 1863, has had all 
the success of a sensational novel, and will share the same 
fate. In disposing of it, we can be much briefer, since a 
refutation of Strauss is also a refutation of Renan. 

He essentially agrees with Strauss, to whom he ex- 
pressly refers as his main authority for critical research ; 
but he has a better appreciation of the realness and en- 
vironments of the gospel history. He correctly remarks 
that the term myths is better applicable to India and 
primitive Greece than to the ancient traditions of the 
Hebrews and the Semitic nations in general. He pre- 
fers the words legend and legendary narratives, "which, 
while they concede a large influence to the work- 
ing of opinions, allow the action and the personal 
character of Jesus to stand out in their completeness." 41 
A myth is purely imaginative ; a legend has a nucleus of 
fact. As Strauss expresses the difference: "Myth is 

"Joseph Ernest Renan was born Feb. 27, 1823, at Treguier in 
Brittany, and died in 1892. 

41 Renan, Studies of Religious History and Criticism, trans- 
lated by O. B. Frothingham, New York, 1864, p. 189. 



116 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

the creation of fact out of an idea ; legend is the seeing 
an idea in a fact." This brings the gospel history down 
to a level with the history of Francis of Assisi, and 
other marvelous saints of the Roman Church ; although 
Renan, inconsistently enough, prefers a parallel between 
the myth of his favorite Sakya-Muni, the founder of 
Buddhism, and the legend of Jesus, and thus falls back 
again to the mythical theory. He regards the so-called 
legend of Jesus as the fruit of the consentaneous en- 
thusiasm and imaginative impulse of the primitive dis- 
ciples. No great event in history has passed without a 
cycle of fables; and Jesus could not, had he wished, 
have silenced these popular creations. 

Renan, moreover, differs from Strauss by admitting 
the essential authenticity of the chief portion of the four 
Gospels, including even the most contested of all, that 
of John, — a concession almost as fatal to his own as to 
the mythical theory, and hence pronounced by Strauss 
the one essential error of Renan. He consequently al- 
lows a larger body of facts in the life of Christ. He 
undertakes, to some extent, the task of reconstruction, 
and proposes to clothe the cloudy phantom and dim 
shadow of the mythical Jesus with real flesh and blood. 
In his essay on the "Critical Historians of Jesus," he 
quotes with approbation the objection of Colani to 
Strauss : "No doubt the apostles, once believing in the 
Messianic character of Jesus, may have added to his 
actual image some lineaments borrowed from prophecy ; 
but how came they to believe in his Messianic character ? 
Strauss has never explained this. What he leaves of 
the Gospels is insufficient as ground for the apostles' 
faith; and it is useless to ascribe to them a disposition 
to be content with the minimum of proof; the proofs 
must needs have been very strong to overcome the crush- 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 117 

ing doubts occasioned by the death on the cross. In 
other words, the person of Jesus must have singularly 
surpassed ordinary proportions; a large part of the 
evangelical narratives must be true." 

Renan's Life of Jesus is interspersed with truly elo- 
quent and enthusiastic tributes to Jesus, — concessions 
which must either overthrow his whole legendary hypoth- 
esis, or else resolve themselves into empty declamation. 
So far, we may regard the French child as an improve- 
ment on its German parent, and a progress in the 
skeptical world toward the acknowledgment of the 
truth. 

59a. Hostile to Miracles. — But while Renan, aided 
by a lively French imagination, and a fresh contempla- 
tion of the Holy Land, which he calls the "Fifth Gos- 
pel," surpasses Strauss in the estimate of the historical 
character of the gospel-record, he is equally hostile to 
miracles, which, in his oracular opinion, "always imply 
imposture or fraud;" and falls far below him on the 
score of scholarship, consistency, and even morality. 
We mean, of course, the morality of his theory, and have 
nothing to do with the morality of his private character, 
which may be without reproach. Compared with this 
critical master, Renan is a mere dilettante and a char- 
latan. He nowhere makes a serious attempt to prove 
any of his novel and arbitrary positions, refers for de- 
tail, once for all, to Strauss and half-a-dozen inferior 
infidel books, ignores their refutation, and deals in oracu- 
lar assertions and eloquent declamations for artistic 
effect. His book nowhere rises to the dignity of solid 
science and scholarship. It is essentially a religious 
novel, with Jesus as the hero, adapted to the taste of 
the fashionable world. 

According to Renan, Jesus was born at Nazareth 



118 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

(not at Bethlehem), but assumed the title of Son of 
David as a necessary condition of success. He grew up 
amidst the charming scenery of Galilee, an ignorant 
peasant of extraordinary genius and spotless virtue. He 
was a "delicious" Rabbi, of ravishing beauty, a preacher 
of the purest code of morals, and a healer of many dis- 
eases of body and mind. 

Renan's Jesus is the most contradictory and impos- 
sible character ever conceived. There are many happy 
and unhappy inconsistencies in the world, and even 
great and good men sometimes combine conflicting traits 
of character. But there is a great difference between 
inconsistencies and contradictions ; and not until all the 
laws of logic and psychology are overthrown, not until 
fire and water dwell together in peace, will sensible people 
believe that one and the same person can be a senti- 
mentalist, an enthusiast, a fanatic, an impostor, a wise 
and charming rabbi, an unequaled saint, and an in- 
carnate God. The Christ of the Gospels requires faith ; 
the Jesus of Renan, the utmost stretch of credulity. 
The Christ of history is a moral miracle ; the Christ of 
romance, a moral monstrosity. Renan exposes himself 
to the combined force of the objections which have been 
urged against all the false theories of the gospel history. 
His self-contradictory picture of Jesus, divested of the 
meretricious charms of a brilliant style and sentimental 
hero-worship, is an insult to sound sense and the dignity 
of man. It rouses the noblest instincts of our nature 
to just indignation. To state it in its nakedness is 
to refute and to condemn it. Even as an artist he 
has failed in the main figure, since his hero lacks the 
essential quality of truthfulness of conception, unity, 
and consistency of character. This defect arises not 
from any want of artistic power of the author, which 



EXAMINATION OF FALSE THEORIES 119 

he possesses in an eminent degree, but from a sort of 
inevitable judgment which must overtake every one who 
dares, with unclean hands, to draw the picture of the 
purest of the pure and the holiest of the holy. 



CHAPTER XV 
CONCLUSION 



59b. INFIDELITY EXHAUSTED. Theories have been tried 
and found wanting. Straus s's attempted substitute 
rejected. 

59c. THE EVER-LIVING CHRIST. The divine Man and 
incarnate God still lives. Jesus Christ shines forth 
with self-evidencing light. He solves the mystery 
of our being. 

"Nebicula est; transibit" — "It is a little cloud; it 
will pass away." This was said by Athanasius of Julian 
the Apostate, who, after a short reign of active hostility 
to Christianity, perished with a confession of utter fail- 
ure. 42 The same may be applied to all the recent at- 
tempts to undermine the faith of humanity in the person 
of its divine Lord and Saviour. The clouds, great and 
small, pass away; the sun continues to shine; darkness 
has its hour ; the light is eternal. No argument against 
the existence or attack upon the character of the sun 
will drive the king of day from the sky, or prevent him 
from blessing the earth. And the eye of man, with its 
sunlike nature, will ever turn to the sun, and drink the 
rays of light as they emanate from the face of Jesus, 

48 The dying exclamation of Julian the Apostate — "Galilean, 
thou hast conquered!" — rests on too late authorities to claim 
credibility, especially in view of the silence of the impartial Am- 
mianus Marcellinus, who furnishes a full account of the last hours 
of the emperor, but it contains the philosophy of his reign, 

120 



CONCLUSION 121 

the "Light of the World." "God, who commanded the 
light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts 
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God 
in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4:4). 

59b. Infidelity Exhausted. — With its last and ablest 
efforts, infidelity seems to have exhausted its scientific 
resources. It could only repeat itself hereafter. Its 
different theories have been tried, and found wanting. 
One has in turn refuted and superseded the other, even 
during the lifetime of their champions. They explain 
nothing in the end: on the contrary, they only substi- 
tute an unnatural prodigy for a supernatural miracle, 
an inextricable enigma for a revealed mystery. They 
equally tend to undermine all faith in God's providence, 
in history, and ultimately in every principle of truth 
and virtue ; and they deprive a poor and fallen humanity, 
in a world of sin, temptation, and sorrow, of its only 
hope and comfort in life and in death. 

Dr. Strauss, the most learned of the infidel biog- 
raphers of Jesus, seems to have had a passing feeling 
of the disastrous tendency of his work of destruction, 
and the awful responsibility he assumed. "The results 
of our inquiry," he says in the closing chapter of his 
large Life of Jesus, "have apparently annihilated the 
greatest and most important part of that which the 
Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Jesus ; 
have uprooted all the encouragements which he has 
derived from his faith, and deprived him of all his con- 
solations. The boundless stores of truth and life which 
for eighteen hundred years have been the aliment of 
humanity seem irretrievably devastated, the most sub- 
lime leveled with the dust, God divested of his grace, 
man of his dignity, and the tie between heaven and earth 
broken. Piety turns away with horror from so fearful 



122 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

an act of desecration, and, strong in the impregnable 
self -evidence of its faith, boldly pronounces that — let an 
audacious criticism attempt what it will — all that the 
Scriptures declare and the Church believes of Christ 
will still subsist as eternal truth; nor need one iota of 
it be renounced." Strauss makes then an attempt, it is 
true, at a philosophical reconstruction of what he vainly 
imagines to have annihilated as a historical fact by his 
sophistical criticism. He professes to admit the abstract 
truth of the orthodox Christology, or the union of the 
divine and human, but perverts it into a purely intellec- 
tual and pantheistic meaning. He refuses divine at- 
tributes and honors to the glorious Head of the race, 
but applies them to a decapitated humanity. He thus 
substitutes, from pantheistic prejudice, a metaphysical 
abstraction for a living reality; a mere notion for an 
historical fact ; a progress in philosophy and mechanical 
arts for the moral victory over sin and death; a pan- 
theistic hero-worship, or self-adoration of a fallen race, 
for the worship of the only true and living God; the 
gift of a stone for the nourishing bread; a gospel of 
despair and final annihilation for the gospel of hope and 
eternal life. 

Humanity scorns such a miserable substitute, which 
has yet to give the first proof of any power for good, 
and which is not likely ever to convert or improve a 
single individual. Humanity must have a living Head, 
a real Lord and Saviour from sin and death. With 
renewed faith and stronger confidence, it will return 
from the dreary desolations of a heartless infidelity, and 
the vain conceits of a philosophy falsely so called, to the 
historical Christ, the promised Messiah, the God in- 
carnate, and will exclaim with Peter: "Lord, where 
shall we go but to thee? Thou alone hast the words of 



CONCLUSION 123 

eternal life, and we believe and are sure that thou art 
the Son of God!" 

59c. The Ever-living Christ. — Yes ! He still lives, 
the divine Man and incarnate God, on the ever-fresh and 
self-authenticating records of the Gospels, in the un- 
broken history of nineteen centuries, and in the hearts 
and lives of the wisest and best of our race; and there 
he will live forever. His person and work are the Book 
of Life, which will never grow old. Christianity lives 
and will continue to live with him, because he lives, the 
same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

Jesus Christ is the most sacred, the most glorious, 
the most certain of all facts; arrayed in a beauty and 
majesty which throw the "starry heavens above us and 
the moral law within us" into obscurity, and fill us 
truly with ever-growing reverence and awe. He shines 
forth with the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. 
He is too great, too pure, too perfect, to have been 
invented by any sinful and erring man. His character 
and claims are confirmed by the sublimest doctrine, the 
purest ethics, the mightiest miracles, the grandest spirit- 
ual kingdom, and are daily and hourly exhibited in the 
virtues and graces of all who yield to the regenerating 
and sanctifying power of his spirit and example. The 
historical Christ meets and satisfies all moral and re- 
ligious aspirations. The soul, if left to its noblest 
impulses and aspirations, instinctively turns to him, as 
the needle to the magnet, as the flower to the sun, as 
the panting hart to the fresh fountain. Wc are made 
for him, and "our heart is without rest until it rests in 
him." He commands our assent, he wins our affections 
and adoration. We cannot look upon him without spir- 
itual benefit. We cannot think of him without being 
elevated above all that is low and mean, and encouraged 



124 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

to all that is good and noble. The very hem of his 
garment is healing to the touch. One hour spent in his 
communion outweighs all the pleasures of sin. He is the 
most precious gift of a merciful God to a fallen world. 
In him are the treasures of wisdom, in him the fountain 
of pardon and peace, in him the only hope and comfort 
in this world and that which is to come. Mankind could 
better afford to lose the literature of Greece and Rome, 
of Germany and France, of England and America, than 
the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Without him, history 
is a dreary waste, a labyrinth of facts without meaning, 
connection, and aim: with him, it is a beautiful, har- 
monious revelation of God, the unfolding of a plan of 
infinite wisdom and love ; all ancient history converges 
to his coming, all modern history receives from him its 
higher life and inspiration. He is the glory of the 
past, the life of the present, the hope of the future. We 
cannot even understand ourselves without him. Ac- 
cording to an old Jewish proverb : "The secret of man 
is the secret of the Messiah." Christ is the great central 
Light of history, and, at the same time, the Light of 
every soul : he alone can solve the mystery of our being, 
and fulfil our intellectual desires after truth, our moral 
aspirations after goodness and holiness, and the longing 
of our feelings after peace and happiness. 

Not for all the wealth and wisdom of this world would 
I weaken the faith of the humblest Christian in his divine 
Lord and Saviour ; but, if, by the grace of God, I could 
convert a single skeptic to a childlike faith in him who 
lived and died for me and for all, I would feel that I had 
not lived in vain. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 

IMPARTIAL TESTIMONIES TO THE 
CHARACTER OF CHRIST 



We present, by way of Appendix, a number of strik- 
ing and remarkable concessions and testimonies to the per- 
fection of Christ's character as a man, from eminent per- 
sons who were either professed unbelievers and skeptics, 
or, at least, free from dogmatic bias, and can therefore 
not be suspected of partiality. This makes their testimony 
all the more valuable for apologetic purposes. It is the 
homage of their genius and intellect to him whose power 
and authority they must acknowledge theoretically, though 
they may practically refuse to accept him as their Lord 
and Saviour. The concession of an enemy, or an outsider, 
sometimes carries more weight in an argument than the 
assertion of a friend. 

These testimonies are important and interesting. They 
prove that there is in the inmost heart of man an instinc- 
tive and growing reverence and admiration for the spotless 
purity of Christ. Infidels may deny his miracles, but they 
cannot deny his power, or assail his character, without 
doing violence to the better feelings and aspirations of 
their own nature, and forfeiting all claim to the moral 
respect of their fellow men. It seems to be felt that he is, 
without controversy, the very best being that ever walked 
on this earth, and that an attack on his character is an 
attack on the honor and dignity of humanity itself. And 
this feeling and conviction become stronger and deeper 
as history advances. The impression of Christ upon the 

127 



128 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

world, far from losing ground, is gaining new strength 
with every stage of civilization, and controls even the best 
thinking of his enemies. 

These testimonies expose also the glaring inconsistency 
of unbelief, in admitting the absolute purity and truthful- 
ness of Christ, and yet refusing his own testimony con- 
cerning himself; in praising his perfection as a man, and 
yet denying his Divinity which he claims himself, and 
which alone can satisfactorily explain his human perfection 
in a universally imperfect world. 

60. Pontius Pilate. — " When he [Pilate] was set 
down on the judgment-seat, his wife sent unto him, saying: 
Have thou nothing to do with that just man; for I have 
suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. 

" When Pilate saw that he could prevail [avail] 
nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, 
and washed his hands before the multitude, saying: I am 
innocent of the blood of this just person; see ye to it." — 
Matt. 27: 19, 24. 

61. The Centurion. — " Now, when the centurion, and 
they that were with him watching Jesus, saw the earth- 
quake, and those things that were done, they feared great- 
ly, saying: Truly this was the [a] Son of God/' — Matt. 
27:54. Comp. Mark 15:39. 

" Now, when the centurion saw what was done, he 
glorified God, saying: Certainly this was a righteous 
man." — Luke 23:47. 

62. Judas Iscariot. — " Then Judas, which had be- 
trayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented 
himself, and brought again [brought back] the thirty 
pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying: I 
have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.'* 
— Matt. 27: 3, 4. 

63. The Talmud, that immense depository of Jewish 
theology and jurisprudence, of Rabbinical wisdom and 
folly, embracing twelve large folio volumes, has very little 
to say about Christ and his religion, which is the fulfil- 



APPENDIX 129 

ment of the Law and the Prophets, and without which the 
Old Testament is a sealed book. 

The first part, called the Mishna {i.e., Repetition, viz., 
of the law), which comprehends the oral traditions and 
Rabbinical expositions of the law from about 400 before to 
about 200 after Christ's birth, ignores Christianity, al- 
though it includes the sayings of many Rabbins of the first 
century, and was composed, according to Dr. Jost, about 
the year 230, in the city of Tiberias, on the Lake of Gali- 
lee, the region where Jesus lived and taught. 

The second part of the Talmud, called the Gemara 
(i.e., Conclusion, viz., of Rabbinical wisdom), or the Tal- 
mud proper, is a vast collection of the Rabbinical exposi- 
tions of the Mishna, which again became a subject of in- 
vestigation and interpretation. There are two Gemaras, — 
that of Jerusalem, compiled in Palestine about a.d. 390; 
and that of Babylon, compiled about a.d. 500, under the 
supervision of the Patriarch of Babylon. Both these 
Gemaras — the Palestinian and the Babylonian — allude to 
Jesus and the apostles, but very briefly, and in a bitter 
and malignant spirit; they admit the miracles of Jesus, but 
derive them from evil spirits, like the Pharisees in the Gos- 
pels. According to the Gemara, Jesus was the illegitimate 
son of Mary (a hairdresser), and a man variously called 
Stada, Pandera, 43 and Pappus (a soldier) ; learned the 
magical arts in Egypt, practised them in Palestine; and 
for this reason, as well as for seducing and instigating the 
Israelites, he was crucified on the day preceding the Pass- 
over. We have here evidently a malignant perversion and 
indirect admission of the facts of the supernatural con- 
ception, the flight to Egypt, the miracles, and the cruci- 
fixion of our Saviour. 

48 This Pandera, who figures also in the book of Celsus, and 
in Toldoth Jeschu (where he is called Joseph Pandera), is no 
doubt a name of hatred and contempt invented by the Jews, and 
means either scourge; or, like the Greek wdy&rip, and the Latin 
lupa, it is synonymous with ravenous lust, and hence used as a 
symbolical name for adultery. 



130 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

At a later period, the Jewish hatred of Christianity pro- 
duced an infamous book, entitled Toldoth Jeschu, i.e., the 
Birth or History of Jesus, where the Talmudic tradition, 
especially the wretched slander about the birth of our 
Saviour, and the most absurd fables, are related with ma- 
lignant hatred. Even according to this miserable produc- 
tion, Christ performed miracles; not, however, by an art 
acquired in Egypt, as the Talmud and Celsus assert, but 
by pronouncing the holy name of Jehovah, which was a 
secret known only to the founder of Christianity. 

In a very different sense, Christ has indeed made 
known the name of the only true and living God. 

Among the better and more enlightened class of modern 
Jews, the opinion seems to be gaining ground that Jesus 
of Nazareth was the Messiah of the Gentiles, to be followed 
by the true Messiah of the Jews. But the majority of the 
Reform Jews are Deists, and substitute their nationality 
for religion. 

64. The Heathen Writers. — The Greek and Roman 
writers of the first five centuries took, upon the whole, very 
little notice of Christ and Christianity, and were mostly 
quite ignorant of their character and history. Tacitus, 
Suetonius, the Younger Pliny, Epictetus, Lucian, Aris- 
tides, Galenus, Lampridius, Dio Cassius, Himerius, Liba- 
nius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Eunapius, and Zosimus, men- 
tion them incidentally, and generally with contempt or 
hatred. The only heathen authors who wrote special works 
against the Christian religion are Lucian (who assailed it 
at least indirectly), Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles, and 
Julian the Apostate. 

But even the incidental allusions of the former and the 
assaults of the latter contain much that tends to confirm 
the credibility of the gospel history and the miracles of 
Christ. Let us briefly sum up the chief references. 

65. Tacitus, who lived in the second half of the 
first and the first quarter of the second century, in giv- 
ing an account of the Neronian persecution of the Chris- 



APPENDIX 131 

tians at Rome, which occurred a.d. 64, incidentally attests 
that Christ was put to death as a malefactor by Pontius 
Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; that he was the founder 
of the Christian sect; that the latter took its rise in 
Judaea, and spread, in spite of the ignominious death of 
Christ, and the hatred and contempt it encountered through- 
out the empire, so that a vast multitude (multitudo ingens) 
of them were most cruelly put to death in the city of 
Rome. He clearly intimates that they were entirely in- 
nocent of the crime laid to their charge by Nero, who him- 
self set the city on fire (to enjoy the spectacle of burn- 
ing Troy), and wickedly made the Christians responsible 
for it. 

Tacitus bears also valuable testimony, together with 
Josephus, from whom he mainly, though not exclusively, 
takes his account, to the fulfilment of Christ's prophecy 
concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, and the overthrow 
of the Jewish people. 44 

66. Pliny the Younger, a contemporary and friend of 
Tacitus and the Emperor Trajan, in his famous Letter to 
Trajan, about 107, bears testimony to the rapid spread of 
Christianity in Asia Minor at that time among all ranks of 
society; the general moral purity and steadfastness of its 
professors amid cruel persecution; their mode and time of 
worship ; their adoration of Christ as God; their observance 
of a " stated day," which is undoubtedly Sunday ; and other 
facts of importance in the early history of the Church. 
Trajan's rescript, in reply to Pliny's inquiry, furnishes 
evidence of the innocence of the Christians. He notices no 
charge against them except their disregard of the worship 
of the gods, and forbids them to be sought after. 

67. Celsus, a Grecian eclectic philosopher of the sec- 
ond century, is the first heathen author who wrote an ex- 
press work against Christianity. It bears the title A True 
Discourse, Origen, in his able and effective refutation, has 
faithfully preserved the principal portions of it in the au- 

44 In the fifth book of his History. 



132 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

thor's own language. Celsus employs all the aids which 
the culture of his age afforded — the weapons of learning, 
philosophy, common sense, wit, sarcasm, and dramatic ani- 
mation of style — to disprove and ridicule Christianity and 
its followers. He combines the hatred of Judaism and the 
contempt of heathenism, and anticipates most of the argu- 
ments and sophisms of the Deists and Naturalists of later 
times. 

And yet even this able infidel assailant, who lived al- 
most within hailing distance of the apostolic age, bears 
witness, as St. Chrysostom already remarked, to the an- 
tiquity of the apostolic writings and the main facts of the 
gospel history. He thus furnishes a strong argument 
against the modern mythical and legendary biographists of 
Jesus. Celsus refers to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and 
John; and makes, upon the whole, about eighty allusions 
to, or quotations from, the New Testament. He takes 
notice of Christ's birth from a virgin in a small village of 
Judaea; the adoration of the wise men from the East; the 
slaughter of the infants by order of Herod; the flight to 
Egypt, where he supposes Christ learned the charms of 
magicians; his residence in Nazareth; his baptism, and the 
descent of the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove, and the 
voice from heaven; the election of his disciples; his friend- 
ship with publicans and other low people; his cures of the 
lame and the blind, and raising of the dead; the betrayal 
of Judas; the denial of Peter; the principal circumstances 
in the history of the passion and crucifixion ; also the resur- 
rection of Christ. _ 

It is true, he perverts or abuses most of these facts; 
but, according to his own showing, they were then gener- 
ally, and had always been, believed by the Christians. He 
does not deny the miracles of Jesus, but, like the Jews, he 
derives them from evil spirits, and makes Jesus a magician 
and impostor. He alludes also to some of the principal 
doctrines of the Christians, to their private assemblies for 
worship, and to the office of presbyters. He omits the 



APPENDIX 133 

grosser charges of immorality, which he probably consid- 
ered absurd and incredible. 

68. Luc i an, a brilliant but frivolous rhetorician of 
Syria, who died in Egypt or Greece, about a.d. 200, wrote 
indirectly against Christianity in his Life of Peregrinus, 
and treated it under disguise, as one of the many follies of 
the age, with the light weapons of wit and ridicule. Yet 
he never calls Christ an impostor, as Celsus did, but a cru- 
cified sophist; a term which he uses as often in a good 
sense as in a bad. 

69. Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor from 361 
to 363, the most gifted and the most bitter of all the an- 
cient assailants of Christianity, endeavored, with the whole 
combined influence of his station, talent, and example, to 
restore idolatry throughout the Roman empire, but in vain. 
His reign passed away like the " baseless fabric of a vision, 
leaving no wreck behind/' save the important lesson that 
ancient paganism was hopelessly extinct, and that no human 
power can arrest the triumphant march of Christianity. 

In his work against the Christian religion, where he 
combined all former attacks, and infused into them his own 
sarcastic spirit, he says of Christ, as quoted by his oppo- 
nent Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, Contr. Jul.: 

" Jesus, having persuaded a few among you [Galileans, 
as he contemptuously called the Christians], and those of 
the worst of men, has now been celebrated about three 
hundred years; having done nothing in his lifetime worthy 
of fame, unless any one thinks it a very great work to heal 
lame and blind people and exorcise demoniacs in the vil- 
lages of Bethsaida and Bethany." 45 

70. Spinoza. — Born 1632; died 1677. Christ was the 
temple of God, because in him God has most fully revealed 
himself. — Epistola 28. 

46 Contra Julian., lib. vi., p. 191. This is sufficiently bitter and 
contemptuous; and yet it concedes to Christ the power of work- 
ing miracles; and these miracles, having all the highest moral and 
benevolent character, are an argument for the purity and divine 
mission of Christ's person. 



134 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

71. Jean Jacques Rousseau. — This famous French 
philosopher and rhetorician was born in Geneva, the city 
of Calvin, in 1712; and died, after a restless, changeful, 
and unhappy life, near Chantilly, in 1778. He did as much 
as any writer, Voltaire not excepted, to prepare the way 
for the French Revolution, and the consequent overthrow 
of the whole social order in France. His life is marked by 
a series of blunders, caprices, glaring inconsistencies, and 
violent changes from Calvinism to Romanism, from Roman- 
ism to infidelity, from infidelity to transient belief, from 
poverty and misery, persecution and exile, to glory and 
happiness, and back again to misery, from philanthropy 
to misanthropy, from sense to the very borders of insanity, 
— all illuminated by flashes of genius. He was one of the 
most eloquent and fascinating, but also one of the most 
paradoxical and dangerous, of writers. He viewed every^ 
thing from his lively imagination, and wrote every line 
under the impulse of feeling and passion. His judgment 
was on the side of virtue and religion; but in his conduct 
he betrayed every principle he enjoined. He drew the 
most charming pictures of female loveliness, and yet he 
lived long in illegal intercourse, and at last married his 
servant, — a vulgar and ill-tempered woman. He rebuked 
the ladies of France for intrusting their children to nurses, 
and yet he placed his own in a foundling-hospital. 

His remarkable testimony to Christ and the Gospels is 
the best thing he ever wrote, and will last the longest. It 
was written about a.d. 1760, and appeared in his work on 
education, which was condemned for its dangerous specu- 
lations on religion and morals by the Parliament of France, 
and caused his banishment from the kingdom. 

" I will confess to you, that the majesty of the Scrip- 
tures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gos- 
pel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of 
our philosophers, with all their pomp of diction, how mean, 
how contemptible are they, compared with the Scriptures ! 
Is it possible that a book, at once so simple and so sublime, 



APPENDIX 135 

should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the 
sacred personage whose history it contains should be him- 
self a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone 
of an enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, 
what purity in his manner ! What an affecting graceful- 
ness in his instructions ! What sublimity in his maxims ! 
W T hat profound wisdom in his discourses ! What presence 
of mind, what subtlety, what fitness, in his replies! How 
great the command over his passions ! Where is the man, 
where the philosopher, who could so live and so die, with- 
out weakness, and without ostentation? When Plato de- 
scribes his imaginary righteous man, loaded with all the 
punishments of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of 
virtue, he describes exactly the character of Jesus Christ; 
the resemblance is so striking, that all the Church Fathers 
perceived it. What prepossession, what blindness must it 
be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the son of Mary! 
What an infinite disproportion there is between them ! . . . 
The death of Socrates, peacefully philosophizing among 
friends, appears the most agreeable that one could wish: 
that of Jesus, expiring in agonies, abused, insulted, and 
accused by a whole nation, is the most horrible that one 
could fear. Socrates, indeed, in receiving the cup of 
poison, blessed the weeping executioner who administered 
it; but Jesus, amidst excruciating tortures, prayed for his 
merciless tormentors. 

" Yes, if the life and death of Socrates were those of 
a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." 46 

72. Napoleon Bonaparte. — Napoleon the First grew 
up in the infidel atmosphere of the eighteenth century, and 
was all his life so much absorbed with schemes of military 
conquest and political dominion that he had no time, even 
if he had the inclination, to reflect seriously on the subject 
of religion. Ambition was the idol monster to which he 

48 E mile ou de L' Education, livre iv. (Profession de Foi du 
Vicaire Savoyard.) (Euvres completes, Paris, 1839, tome iii., pp. 
365-367. 



136 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

sacrificed millions of human beings, and even his devoted 
wife, whom he ardently loved and admired. But he had 
too profound an intellect ever to be an atheist. He was 
constitutionally inclined to fatalism; and like his nephew, 
Napoleon III., he believed in his star. He knew that 
religion was an essential element in human nature, and 
the strongest pillar of public morals and social order. 
In his Egyptian campaign, it is said, he carried with him 
a New Testament along with the Koran, under the charac- 
teristic title, " Politics. " It was from this political point 
of view that he restored the Roman Catholic Church in 
France (which the folly of the Revolution had swept 
away), and secured to the Protestants the liberty of public 
worship, but kept both subject to the secular power and 
his despotic will. 

In his last will and testament, which was drawn up 
six years before his death, at Longwood, Island of St. 
Helena, he declares: " I die in the apostolic Roman re- 
ligion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty 
years ago." But this is a conventional phrase in Roman 
Catholic countries. In 1819 he sent for two Italian 
priests, — the aged Abbe Buonavita, who had been chaplain 
to his mother at Elba and to the Princess Pauline at Rome; 
and the young Abbe Vignali, who was also a physician. 
He professed his assent and submission to the faith and 
discipline of the Catholic Christian religion, attended mass 
every Sunday, and received the sacrament of extreme unc- 
tion before his death. 

These facts do not justify the inference that Napoleon 
became a true Christian. His public and private life ex- 
hibit no trace of piety. His submission to the rites of the 
Roman Church on his death-bed is hardly sufficient to be 
construed into an act of genuine repentance, and may have 
been dictated in part by policy, or a prudent regard for 
his own reputation, the interests of his dynasty, and the 
public sentiment in France. He died amidst dreams and 
visions of war and victory. " France ! Josephine ! head of 



APPENDIX 137 

the army ! " were his last words, — a suitable summing-up 
of his life. 

But I have no doubt that his intellect bowed before the 
majesty of Christ. Reasoning from the overpowering au- 
thority and dignity of Christ as a teacher, from the amaz- 
ing result of his peaceful mission, and the imperishable 
nature of his kingdom as contrasted with the vanity of all 
human conquests and secular empires, he justly inferred 
that Christ was more than man, that he was truly divine, 
and that his Divinity is the key which unlocks the myster- 
ies of Christianity. In this respect he went further than 
any of the witnesses in this collection, who stop with the 
concession of the unparalleled human greatness of Christ. 
The logical conclusion of the marvelous intellect of Napo- 
leon, and his profound knowledge of men, may be fairly 
set over against the illogical denial of Christ's Divinity by 
inferior minds. 

In view of all I can gather, I am inclined to believe 
that these religious conversations of Napoleon have been 
enlarged or modified in the recollection of reporters, but 
are authentic in substance; because they have the grandilo- 
quent and egotistic manner of Napoleon, and are marked 
by that massive grandeur and granitelike simplicity of 
thought and style which characterize the best of his utter- 
ances. They are, moreover, quite consistent with the unde- 
niable fact, that he expressed himself, both in his tes- 
tament and on his death-bed, a believer in the Catholic 
Christian religion, whieh always taught the Divinity of 
Christ as a fundamental article of faith. 

One day Napoleon, speaking of Christ, said to Genera] 
Bertrand : 

" I know men ; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not 
a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ 
and the founders of empires, and the gods of other relig- 
ions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between 
Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of 
infinity. 



138 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

" Everything in him astonishes me. His spirit over- 
awes me, and his will confounds me. . . . He is truly 
a being by himself. His ideas and his sentiments, the 
truth which he announces, his manner of convincing, are 
not explained either by human organization or by the na- 
ture of things. 

" Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded 
empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our 
genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his em- 
pire upon love; and, at this hour, millions of men would die 
for him. 

" In every other existence but that of Christ, how many 
imperfections ! Where is the character which has not yield- 
ed, vanquished by obstacles? Where is the individual who 
has never been governed by circumstances or places; who 
has never succumbed to the influences of the times; who 
has never compounded with any customs or passions? 
From the first day to the last he is the same, always the 
same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm, and infinitely 
gentle. 

"Truth should embrace the universe. Such is Chris- 
tianity, — the only religion which destroys sectional preju- 
dices; the only one which proclaims the unity and the ab- 
solute brotherhood of the whole human family; the only 
one which is purely spiritual; in fine, the only one which 
assigns to all, without distinction, for a true country, the 
bosom of the Creator, God. Christ proved that he was the 
Son of the Eternal by his disregard of time. All his doc- 
trines signify one only and the same thing, — eternity." 

73. Goethe, the most universal and highly cultivated 
of poets, was probably, like Napoleon, theoretically con- 
vinced of the divinity of Christ, but too much a man of the 
world to give himself any serious practical concern about 
it. In his youth he was, through his friendship with Jung, 
Stilling, Lavater, and Fraulein von Klettenberg (whose 
"Confessions of a Beautiful Soul " he incorporated in his 
Wilhelm Meister), not far from the kingdom of Christ, but 



APPENDIX 139 

never surrendered himself to its spiritual power. After his 
journey to Italy he broke off these Christian associations, 
and declined, with cold politeness, the well-meant monitions 
of noble Christian friends such as the Countess of Stolberg. 

An interesting selection of deep Christian thoughts 
might be made from his Faust, and other works; but his 
poetic effusions do not always express his personal convic- 
tions. We present here only his direct testimony to the 
truth of the gospel and the superhuman nature of Christ 
from the last years of his life. 

" I consider the Gospels to be thoroughly genuine; 
for in them there is the effective reflection of a sublimity 
which emanated from the Person of Christ; and this is as 
Divine as ever the Divine appeared on earth/ ' 47 

Eleven days before his death Goethe confessed to Eck- 
ermann that he held a rational belief in positive Christian- 
ity. One of his last utterances, which we may call his 
dying confession on the subject of religion, is very 
remarkable : 

" We hardly know how much we are indebted to Luther 
and the Reformation in general. No matter how much the 
human mind may progress in intellectual culture, in the 
science of nature, in breadth and depth, it will never be 
able to rise above the elevation and moral culture of Chris- 
tianity as it shines in the Gospels." 

74. Thomas Carlyle. — This powerful writer is an 
open worshiper of human heroes like Cromwell, Frederick 
the Great, Luther, and John Knox, but also a silent wor- 
shiper of the Divine hero, whom he was taught to love 
and adore on the knees of a pious Scotch mother. 

He calls Jesus of Nazareth " our divinest symbol. 
Higher has the human thought not yet reached. A symbol 
of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance 
will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made 
manifest. ,, 48 

47 Conversations with Eckermann (March 11, 1832). 
"Sartor Besartus, bk. iii., chap. 3. 



140 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

75. William Ellery Channing— Born 1780; died 
1842. We are far from placing Dr. Channing, the great 
leader of American Unitarianism, and one of the brightest 
ornaments of American literature, in the company of skep- 
tics or unbelievers. Although heterodox on the vital articles 
of the Holy Trinity and the Atonement, he was, in his way, 
a worshiper of Jesus, and exhibited the power of his holy 
example in his lovely character and written works. He was 
deeply penetrated with the ethical spirit of Christianity, 
more so than many of his orthodox opponents. We select 
a passage from his admirable Sermons, which bear strong 
testimony to the perfection of Christ's character, and which 
consistently would lead far beyond the Socinian or Unita- 
rian Christology which he advocated. The italics are our 
own: 

" This Jesus lived with men: with the consciousness of 
unutterable majesty, he joined a lowliness, gentleness, hu- 
manity, and sympathy which have no example in human 
history. I ask you to contemplate this wonderful union. 
In proportion to the superiority of Jesus to all around him, 
was the intimacy, the brotherly love, with which he bound 
himself to them. I maintain that this is a character wholly 
remote from human conception. To imagine it to be the 
production of imposture or enthusiasm, shows a strange un- 
soundness of mind. I contemplate it with a veneration sec- 
ond only to the profound awe with which I look up to God. 
It bears no mark of human invention. It was real. It 
belonged to, and it manifested, the beloved Son of 
God. . . . 

"Here I pause; and indeed I know not what can be 
added to heighten the wonder, reverence, and love which 
are due to Jesus. When I consider him, not only as pos- 
sessed with the consciousness of an unexampled and un- 
bounded majesty, but as recognizing a kindred nature in 
human beings, and living and dying to raise them to a par- 
ticipation of his divine glories; and when I see him, under 
these views, allying himself to men by the tenderest ties, 



APPENDIX 141 

embracing them with a spirit of humanity, which no insult, 
injury, or pain could for a moment repel or overpower, — I 
am filled with wonder as well as reverence and love. I feel 
that this character is not of human invention; that it was 
not assumed through fraud, or struck out by enthusiasm; 
for it is infinitely above their reach. When I add this 
character of Jesus to the other evidences of his religion, it 
gives, to what before seemed so strong, a new and a vast 
accession of strength: I feel as if I could not be deceived. 
The Gospels must be true: they were drawn from a living 
original; they were founded on reality. The character of 
Jesus is not a fiction: he was what he claimed to be, and 
what his followers attested. Nor is this all. Jesus not 
only was, he is still, the Son of God, the Saviour of the 
world. He exists now: he has entered that heaven to which 
he always looked forward on earth. There he lives and 
reigns. With a clear, calm faith, I see him in that state 
of glory; and I confidently expect, at no distant period, to 
see him face to face. We have, indeed, no absent friend 
whom we shall so surely meet. Let us, then, my hearers, 
by imitation of his virtues and obedience to his word, pre- 
pare ourselves to join him in those pure mansions, where 
he is surrounding himself with the good and pure of our 
race, and will communicate to them for ever his own spirit, 
power, and joy." 49 

76. David Friedrich Strauss. — " If in Jesus the 
union of the self-consciousness with the consciousness of 
God has been real, and expressed not only in words, but 
actually revealed in all the conditions of his life, he rep- 
resents within the religious sphere the highest point, be- 
yond which posterity cannot go; yea, whom it cannot even 
equal, inasmuch as every one who hereafter should climb 
the same height, could only do it with the help of Jesus, 
who first attained it. As little as humanity will ever be 
without religion, as little will it be without Christ; for to 

49 From the sermon on the Character of Christ (on Matt. 17: 
5), in Dr. Channing's Works, Boston, 1848, vol. iv., pp. 1-29. 



142 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

have religion without Christ would be as absurd as to enjoy 
poetry without regard to Homer or Shakespeare. And this 
Christ, as far as he is inseparable from the highest style 
of religion, is historical, not mythical; is an individual, no 
mere symbol. To the historical person of Christ belongs 
all in his life that exhibits his religious perfection, his dis- 
courses, his moral action, and his passion. . . . He re- 
mains the highest model of religion within the reach of our 
thought; and no perfect piety is possible without his pres- 
ence in the heart" 50 

77. Theodore Parker. — Born 1810; died I860, repre- 
sents the left or radical wing of American Unitarianism, as 
Channing represents the right or conservative wing. He 
adopted, with some exceptions, the mythical theory of Dr. 
Strauss. He speaks of "limitations of Jesus;" says that 
Jesus " shared the erroneous notions of the times respect- 
ing devils, possessions, and demonology in general; " that 
he " was mistaken in his interpretation of the Old Testa- 
ment; " that he was an " enthusiast," at least to some ex- 
tent, — all of which, however, he regards as mere trifles, not 
affecting in the least his moral and religious character. 
Then he finds fault with Jesus for denouncing his oppo- 
nents in no measured terms, calling the Pharisees " hypo- 
crites," and " children of the devil." " We cannot tell how 
far the historians have added to the fierceness of this in- 
vective; but the general fact must probably remain, that he 
did not use courteous speech." But that, he thinks, consid- 
ering the youth of the man, was a very venial error, to 
make the worst of it. This is what Parker calls " the nega- 
tive side, or the limitations of Jesus." He then considers 
the " positive side, or the excellences of Jesus." We make 
the following extracts: 

" In estimating the character of Jesus, it must be re- 
membered that he died at an age when man has not reached 
his fullest vigor. The great works of creative intellect, the 

60 From his essay, Vergangliches und Bhibendes im Chris- 
tenthum, 1838, Freihafen, 3tes Heft, p. 47. 



APPENDIX 143 

maturest products of man, all the deep and settled plans of 
reforming the world, come from a period when experience 
gives a wider field as the basis of hope. Socrates was but 
an embryo sage till long after the age of Jesus : poems, and 
philosophies that live, come at a later date. Now, here we 
see a young man, but little more than thirty years old, with 
no advantage of position; the son and companion of rude 
people; born in a town whose inhabitants were wicked to a 
proverb ; of a nation, above all others distinguished for their 
superstition, for national pride, exaltation of themselves, 
and contempt for all others; in an age of singular corrup- 
tion, when the substance of religion had faded out from the 
mind of its anointed ministers, and sin had spread wide 
among a people turbulent, oppressed, and down-trodden. 
A man ridiculed for his lack of knowledge, in this nation 
of forms, of hypocritical priests, and corrupt people, falls 
back on simple morality, simple religion; unites in himself 
the sublimest precepts and divinest practices, thus more 
than realizing the dream of prophets and sages; rises free 
from all prejudice of his age, nation, or sect; gives free 
range to the Spirit of God in his breast; sets aside the law, 
sacred and time-honored as it was, its forms, its sacrifice, 
its temple, and its priests ; puts away the doctors of the law, 
subtle, learned, irrefragable, and pours out a doctrine beau- 
tiful as the light, sublime as heaven, and true as God. The 
philosophers, the poets, the prophets, the rabbis, — he rises 
above them all. Yet Nazareth was no Athens, where phil- 
osophy breathed in the circumambient air: it had neither 
Porch nor Lyceum; not even a school of the prophets. 
There is God in the heart of this youth. . . . 

" That mightiest heart that ever beat, stirred by the 
Spirit of God, how it wrought in his bosom! What words 
of rebuke, of comfort, counsel, admonition, promise, hope, 
did he pour out! words that stir the soul as summer dews 
call up the faint and sickly grass. What profound instruc- 
tion in his proverbs and discourses! what wisdom in 
his homely sayings, so rich with Jewish life! what deep 



144 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

divinity of soul in his prayers, his action, sympathy, 
resignation! . . . 

" Try him as we try other teachers. They deliver their 
word; find a few waiting for the consolation, who accept 
the new tidings, follow the new method, and soon go be- 
yond their teacher, though less mighty minds than he. Such 
is the case with each founder of a school of philosophy, 
each sect in religion. Though humble men, we see what 
Socrates and Luther never saw. But eighteen centuries 
have passed since the tide of humanity rose so high in 
Jesus: what man, what sect, what church, has mastered his 
thought, comprehended his method, and so fully applied it 
to life? Let the world answer in its cry of anguish. Men 
have parted his raiment among them, cast lots for his seam- 
less coat; but that spirit which toiled so manfully in a 
world of sin and death, which died and suffered and over- 
came the world, — is that found, possessed, understood? 
Nay, is it sought for and recommended by any of our 
churches ? " 51 

78. John Stuart Mill.— Born 1806; died 1873. 
" Above all, the most valuable part of the effect upon the 
character which Christianity has produced by holding up in 
a Divine Person a standard of excellence and a model for 
imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and 
can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ, rather 
than God, whom Christianity has held up to believers as the 
pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God in- 
carnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, who 
being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on 
the modern mind. And whatever else may be taken away 
from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique 
figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his follow- 
ers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal 
teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in 
the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how 

61 From A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. Third 
ed. Boston, 1847, pp. 375-287. 



APPENDIX 145 

much of what is admirable has been superadded by the 
tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suf- 
fices to insert any number of marvels, and may have in- 
serted all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. 
But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was 
capable of inventing the saying ascribed to Jesus, or im- 
agining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? 
Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. 
Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally 
different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom 
nothing is more evident than that the good which was in 
them was all derived, as they always professed that it was 
derived, from the higher source/' 52 

79. Ernest Renan. — " Jesus cannot belong exclusively 
to those who call themselves his disciples. He is the com- 
mon honor of all who bear a human heart. His glory con- 
sists not in being banished from history: we render him a 
truer worship by showing that all history is incomprehen- 
sible without him. . . . 

" Repose now in thy glory, noble founder ! Thy work 
is finished ; thy divinity is established. Fear no more to see 
the edifice of thy labors fall by any fault. Henceforth, 
beyond the reach of frailty, thou shalt witness, from the 
heights of divine peace, the infinite results of thy acts. At 
the price of a few hours of suffering, which did not even 
reach thy grand soul, thou hast bought the most complete 
immortality. For thousands of years the world will de- 
fend thee ! Banner of our contests, thou shalt be the stand- 
ard about which the hottest battle will be given. A thou- 
sand times more alive, a thousand times more beloved since 

M From his essay on Theism completed shortly before his death, 
and published, 1874, with two other essays under the title, Three 
Essays on Religion (Am. ed. by Holt, p. 253). In this essay Mill 
unsettles aU the arguments for the existence of God and the im- 
mortality of the soul, but winds up with the foregoing testimony 
to Christ. He said of himself that he never had any religious 
belief, but he made an idol of his wife, especially after her death. 
We have here his last utterance. 



146 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

thy death than during thy passage here below, thou shalt 
become the corner-stone of humanity so entirely, that to 
tear thy name from this world would be to rend it to its 
foundations. Between thee and God there will be no 
longer any distinction. Complete conqueror of death, take 
possession of thy kingdom; whither shall follow thee, by 
the royal road which thou hast traced, ages of worship- 
ers. . . . 

"Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus 
will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young 
without ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without 
end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages 
will proclaim, that, among the sons of men, there is none 
born greater than Jesus." 53 

80. W. E. H. Lecky.— Born 1838; died 1903. "If 
Christianity was remarkable for its appeals to the , selfish 
or interested side of our nature, it was far more remark- 
able for the empire it attained over disinterested enthusi- 
asm. The Platonist exhorted men to imitate God ; the Stoic, 
to follow reason; the Christian, to the love of Christ. The 
later Stoics had often united their notions of excellence in 
an ideal sage, and Epictetus had even urged his disciples 
to set before them some man of surpassing excellence, and 
to imagine him continually near them; but the utmost the 
Stoic ideal could become was a model for imitation, and the 
admiration it inspired could never deepen into affection. 

" It was reserved for Christianity to present to the 
world an ideal character, which through all the changes of 
eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an 
impassioned love, has shown itself capable of acting on all 
ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions, has been not 
only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incen- 
tive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence 
that it may be truly said that the simple record of three 

68 From the Vie de Je*sus, par E. Renan, membre de PInstitut, 
Septieme Edition. Paris, 1864. English translation by Charles 
Edwin Wilbour. New York, 1864, pp. 50, 303, 376. 



APPENDIX 147 

short years of active life has done more to regenerate and 
to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers 
and all the exhortations of moralists. 

" This has indeed been the wellspring of whatever is 
best and purest in the Christian life. Amid all the sins and 
failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and fa- 
naticism that have defaced the church, it has preserved, in 
the character and example of its Founder, an enduring 
principle of regeneration. Perfect love knows no rights. 
It creates a boundless, uncalculating self-abnegation that 
transforms the character, and is the parent of every virtue. 
Side by side with the terrorism and the superstitions of 
dogmatism, there have ever existed in Christianity those 
who would echo the wish of St. Theresa, that she could 
blot out both heaven and hell, to serve God for himself 
alone; and the power of the love of Christ has been dis- 
played alike in the most heroic pages of Christian martyr- 
dom, in the most pathetic pages of Christian resignation, in 
the tenderest pages of Christian charity. It was shown by 
the martyrs who sank beneath the fangs of wild beasts, ex- 
tending to the last moment their arms in the form of the 
cross they loved ; who ordered their chains to be buried with 
them as the insignia of their warfare; who looked with joy 
upon their ghastly wounds, because they had been received 
for Christ; who welcomed death as the bridegroom wel- 
comes the bride, because it would bring them near to 
him." 54 

81. "Supernatural Religion." 55 — " It must be admit- 
ted that Christian ethics were not in their details either 
new or original. The precepts which distinguish the sys- 

54 From his History of European Morals (New York Ed.), 
vol. ii., pp. 9, 10. 

56 The anonymous author of this work reproduces in English 
the most advanced German and Dutch Rationalism of the Tubin- 
gen and Leyden schools, and endeavors to divest Christianity of 
all its supernatural elements, explaining them away as the after- 
growth of the fervid imagination of the East. Yet he is forced 
to admit that the historical Christ represents in doctrine and life 
the highest attainable summit of moral purity and perfection. 



148 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

tem may be found separately in early religions, in ancient 
philosophies, and in the utterances of the great poets and 
seers of Israel. The teaching of Jesus, h« fever, carried 
morality to the sublimest point attained, or even attainable, 
by humanity. The influence of his spiritual religion has 
been rendered doubly great by the unparalleled purity and 
elevation of his own character. Surpassing in his sublime 
simplicity and earnestness the moral grandeur of Sakya 
Muni, and putting to the blush the sometimes sullied, though 
generally admirable, teaching of Socrates and Plato, and 
the whole round of Greek philosophers, he presented the 
rare spectacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uni- 
formly noble and consistent with his own lofty principles, 
so that the ' imitation of Christ ' has become almost the 
final word in the preaching of his religion, and must con- 
tinue to be one of the most powerful elements of its per- 
manence. His system might not be new, but it was in a 
high sense the perfect development of natural morality, and 
it was final in this respect among others, that, superseding 
codes of law and elaborate rules of life, it confined itself 
to two fundamental principles: Love to God and love to 
man. While all previous systems had merely sought to 
purify the stream, it demanded the purification of the foun- 
tain. It placed the evil thought on a par with the evil ac- 
tion. Such morality, based upon the intelligent and 
earnest acceptance of divine law, and perfect recognition 
of the brotherhood of man, is the highest conceivable by 
humanity, and although its power and influence must aug- 
ment with the increase of enlightenment, it is itself beyond 
development, consisting as it does of principles unlimited in 
their range and inexhaustible in their application. Its per- 
fect realization is that extinction of rebellious personal op- 
position to divine order, and the attainment of perfect har- 
mony with the will of God." 56 

56 From Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Relation 
of Divine Revelation. Sixth ed., London, 1875-79, vol. ii., pp. 
487, 488. 



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